Sony – The Fallen Electronics Giant

Introduction

Sony Corporation is a Japanese manufacturer of consumer electronics products. Its product includes Mobile communications, Gaming and network services, Home entertainment and sound, Pictures, Music. Sony has grown from a low level to multinational giant. Low level means that the co-founders of Sony Masaru Ibuka and Akio Morita started the company with an investment of $500 and now it’s a company worth $75Billion revenue. The first consumer product manufactured by the company was electric rice cooker. After the introduction of electric rice cooker, many other products were made from tape recorder to organic light-emitting diode TV (OLED TV). But later, rivals such as Apple Inc. and Samsung electronics Co. gathered more consumer attraction making Sony falling behind. This report emphasizes on the flourish and doom of Sony. The main points discussed in this report include:

• Success of Sony company
• Loss of fame
• Solutions.

Success of Sony

Products produced by Sony are world famous and sold everywhere around the world. Sony was responsible for number of significant innovations. Surveys in early 2000 say that Sony is popular and well-known brand name in America, and it is the third high quality brand after Nike and Tommy Hilfinger in America. Sony developed world’s first transistor radio in 1955 that shoot up the brand name Sony to its higher level. Followed by Sony produced many revolutionary products such as Trinitron colour TV, Walkman. The turning point of Sony was during 1970’s and 1980’s. Sony produced modern-looking televisions, walkman’s, compact disc players and other popular electronic products. During 1970s Sony was not having any high-ended competitors like apple, Samsung, Huawei, Microsoft, Foxconn.1970s Sony was leading the electronics market.

Initial Annual Revenue

When observing the annual revenue and number of employees of Sony during its initial stage, we can observe that Sony was having only 159 employees during 1951 with revenue of 4.93L. As the year increases the no of employees and revenue increases drastically and finally in 2001 Sony was having 181,000 employees and 58.52B revenue. From this evidence we can come to a point that Sony was having a great success during those years,

Loss of Fame

Sony Company started to loss its fame when its competitors such as Samsung, Apple, Huawei, Microsoft, Foxconn started to grow in a faster rate. Sony was not able to produce any revolutionary products after play station 4(PS4) in 2013. Ben Collett, head of Asian equities at Sunrise Brokers, in Hong Kong said “Sony has lost a lot of brand value to companies like Samsung because they are just not innovative”. Market share of Sony is only 8.03%. Apple with market share of 28.03% has highest revenue. By taking the average of revenues (average=155.65) of all top companies listed from table 1, it can be clearly seen that Sony company is having below average revenue which has led to loss of fame.

Solutions For Sony’s Loss

• Sony should look up on the consumers because feedback of consumers has a great value.
• Sony should organize an open public meeting to get more feedback so that Sony can make an improvement on its current faults.
• Even if profit is the sole aim of a business a company should consider the quality and affordability in order to have a strong bond between a company and its consumers.

Conclusion

Sony was one of the electronics giants during the time when they started their business. Through their journey they faced many challenges and competitions. Sony had never failed to gather the customer satisfaction through innovations and development. Sony had captured customer’s heart through their initial innovations. But recently in 2018 Sony was losing its place in consumer market when comparing to other competitors. Sony is having below average revenue in 2018. Sony must introduce new innovative products that will conquer people’s hand and to successfully overcome the problem.

References

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