Sony's story begins in September 1945, when engineer Masaru Ibuka opened a small electronics shop in a Tokyo department store building, working with modest resources but genuine ambition. The following year, on May 7, 1946, physicist Akio Morita joined him, and together they founded Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo — Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation — with an initial capital of just ¥190,000 and eight employees. Their first product, the Type-G, became Japan's first tape recorder.

In the early 1950s, Ibuka travelled to the United States and secured a license for Bell Labs' newly invented transistor technology — a decision that set Sony apart from many Japanese companies pursuing the technology purely for military applications. Ibuka and Morita instead saw its potential for communications and consumer electronics, a bet that paid off spectacularly. The company adopted the Sony name in 1958, blending the Latin "sonus" (sound) with "sonny," a term used at the time for a bright, free-spirited young person — a name chosen deliberately to travel easily across language and culture.