kids encyclopedia robot

Sony facts for kids

Kids Encyclopedia Facts
Quick facts for kids
Sony Group Corporation
Native name
ソニーグループ株式会社
Sonī Gurūpu Kabushiki kaisha
Formerly
  • Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo K.K. (1946–1957)
  • Sony Corporation (1958–2021)
Public
Traded as
  • TYO: 6758
  • NYSESONY
  • Nikkei 225 component (6758)
  • TOPIX Core30 component (6758)
Industry Conglomerate
Founded 7 May 1946; 77 years ago (1946-05-07)
Nihonbashi, Chūō, Tokyo, Japan
Founders
Headquarters Kōnan, ,
Japan
Area served
Worldwide
Key people
  • Kenichiro Yoshida
    (chairman and CEO)
  • Hiroki Totoki
    (president and COO)
Products
Services
Revenue Increase ¥11.540 trillion (FY2022)
Operating income
Increase ¥1.208 trillion (FY2022)
Increase ¥943.622 billion (FY2022)
Total assets Increase ¥32.041 trillion (FY2022)
Total equity Increase ¥7.288 trillion (FY2022)
Number of employees
113,000 (2023)
Subsidiaries
Footnotes / references
Financials as of 31 March  2021 (2021 -03-31).

Sony is a technology company, based in Japan, which makes many electric products. Among its most popular products is the video game console PlayStation, which was followed by PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4 and now the PlayStation 5. They also sold the Walkman invented by Andreas Pavel - a small music audio cassette player that could fit in your pocket - they later made Walkman systems that could play CDs, MiniDiscs or MP3s instead of tapes, and they often could receive radio too.

The company also makes music players, televisions, headsets, mobile phones (Sony Ericsson) and computers (named Sony Vaio), and game players (PlayStation).

It owns the American movie studios, Columbia Pictures and TriStar Pictures, through Sony Pictures.

History

Sony began in the wake of World War II. In 1946, Masaru Ibuka started an electronics shop in Shirokiya, a department store building in the Nihonbashi area of Tokyo. The company started with a capital of ¥190,000 and a total of eight employees. On 7 May 1946, Ibuka was joined by Akio Morita to establish a company called Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo (東京通信工業, Tōkyō Tsūshin Kōgyō, Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation). The company built Japan's first tape recorder, called the Type-G. In 1958, the company changed its name to "Sony".

In 45 years Sony has grown from a small firm, employing 20 workers, to a multinational corporation, employing about 100,000 workers.

Name

The name "Sony" was chosen for the brand as a mix of two words: one was the Latin word "sonus", which is the root of sonic and sound, and the other was "sonny", a common slang term used in 1950s America to call a young boy. In 1950s Japan, "sonny boys" was a loan word in Japanese, which connoted smart and presentable young men, which Akio Morita and Masaru Ibuka considered themselves to be.

At the time of the change, it was extremely unusual for a Japanese company to use Roman letters to spell its name instead of writing it in kanji.

Game & network services

Sony Interactive Entertainment San Mateo
Sony Interactive Entertainment headquarters in San Mateo, California

Sony Interactive Entertainment (formerly Sony Computer Entertainment) is best known for producing the popular line of PlayStation consoles.

Launched in 1994, the first PlayStation gained 61% of global console sales and broke Nintendo's long-standing lead in the market. Sony followed up with the PlayStation 2 in 2000, which was even more successful. The console has become the most successful of all time, selling over 150 million units as of 2011. Sony released the PlayStation 3, a high-definition console, in 2006. It was the first console to use the Blu-ray format, and was considerably more expensive than the competitors Xbox 360 and Wii due to the Cell processor.

Early on, poor sales performance resulted in significant losses for the company, pushing it to sell the console at a loss. The PlayStation 3 sold generally more poorly than its competitors in the early years of its release but managed to overtake the Xbox 360 in global sales later on. It later introduced the PlayStation Move, an accessory that allows players to control video games using motion gestures.

The PlayStation 2 is the best-selling video game console of all time.
The PlayStation 5 is the current-generation video game console by Sony.

Sony extended the brand to the portable games market in 2004 with the PlayStation Portable (PSP). The console has sold reasonably, but has taken a second place to a rival handheld, the Nintendo DS. Sony developed the Universal Media Disc (UMD) optical disc medium for use on the PlayStation Portable. Early on, the format was used for movies, but it has since lost major studio support. Sony released a disc-less version of its PlayStation Portable, the PSP Go, in 2009. The company went on to release its second portable video game system, PlayStation Vita, in 2011 and 2012. Sony launched its fourth console, the PlayStation 4, on 15 November 2013, which as of 31 December 2017 has sold 73.6 million units globally.

On 18 March 2014, at GDC, president of SCE Worldwide Studios Shuhei Yoshida announced their new virtual reality technology dubbed Project Morpheus, and later named PlayStation VR, for PlayStation 4. The headset brought VR gaming and non-gaming software to the company's console. According to a report released by Houston-based patent consulting firm LexInnova in May 2015, Sony is leading the virtual reality patent race. According to the firm's analysis of nearly 12,000 patents or patent applications, Sony has 366 virtual reality patents or patent applications. PlayStation VR was released worldwide on 13 October 2016.

On 31 March 2019, the successor to the PlayStation 4 was announced and on 12 November 2020, the PlayStation 5 was released in North America, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, and Singapore. The console was launched in Indonesia on 22 January 2021. Upon completion of the fiscal quarter, Sony sold 4.5 million PlayStation 5 consoles, keeping pace with the best-selling console of all time, the PlayStation 2.

Images for kids

See also

Kids robot.svg In Spanish: Sony para niños

kids search engine
Sony Facts for Kids. Kiddle Encyclopedia.