Sony Suggests Japanese Innovation Dies Through Succession Failure
Japan's most valuable consumer technology conglomerate led global innovation in electronics for decades. Succession failure has made it less than the sum of its parts.
Reporting a total annual revenue of $88 billion in 2023, Sony Group Corporation is one of the largest conglomerates in Japan and one of the most valuable Japanese companies by market capitalization at $87 billion as of August 2024 (SONY).1 Among various other lines of business, Sony is the world leader in image sensor semiconductor manufacturing, the largest video game company by revenue, the second-largest music publishing company, and the fourth-largest film studio. Sony has been a global leader in consumer electronics innovation for decades, through products like the Walkman portable audio player, the compact disc (CD), Blu-ray, and the PlayStation game console. Sony is a key case study in the trajectory of the Japanese economy as a whole—the world’s third-largest after the United States and China, but one that has stagnated since the 1990s.