Overview
Sony is the only Japanese consumer electronics giant that has made a successful move into global content production and distribution.
Sales in the FY ended March 2001 were US$58.5 billion, the group has around 1,000 subsidiaries and has 181,800 employees worldwide.
A chronology of the group is here.
In September 2004 Sony led a consortium (inc Providence Equity Partners, Texas Pacific Group and DLJ Merchant Banking Partners) that confirmed an in principle agreement to acquire Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc. (MGM) for US$5 billion.
Holdings
The following page provides an indication of Sony holdings. It is an electronics, content, services and financial conglomerate.
Overall the group has some 1,000 subsidiaries and affiliates worldwide, including retail operations and a line of cosmetics; around a third are unrelated to the core electronics businesses. In Japan it has three financial units (Sony Life Insurance, nonlife insurer Sony Assurance and Sony Bank) which earned US$1.7 billion in 2005.
Studies
The outstanding study is John Nathan's Sony: The Private Life (Boston, Houghton Mifflin 1999). It's more insightful than Nick Lyons' The Sony Vision (New York: Crown 1976).
Simon Partner's Assembled In Japan: Electrical Goods & The Making Of The Japanese Consumer (Berkeley: Uni of California Press 1999) is concentrates on the early history, as does Bob Johnstone's We Were Burning: Japanese Entrepreneurs & The Forging of the Electronic Age (New York: Basic Books 1999).
Co-founder Akio Morita's memoir Made In Japan: Akio Morita & Sony (New York: Dutton 1986) is thin, as is Reiji Asakura's Revolutionaries at Sony: The Making of the Sony Playstation & The Visionaries Who Conquered the World of Video Games (New York: McGraw Hill 2000).
Norman Lebrecht's mordant When The Music Stops (New York: Simon & Schuster 1996) is an account of Sony's move into music recording; particular strong on classical music. Fredric Dannen's Hit Men: Power Brokers & Fast Money Inside The Music Business (New York: Vintage 1991) is an acerbic expose of its adventures in the contemporary music business.
Hit & Run: How Jon Peters & Peter Guber Took Sony for A Ride In Hollywood (New York: Touchstone 1997) is an expose by Nancy Griffin of how the guys from Tokyo handed over Columbia Pictures to "Barbra Streisand's hairdresser".
David Geffen's profiled in Stephen Singular's The Rise & Rise of David Geffen (New York: Birch Lane 1997), Tom King's more substantial David Geffen: A Biography Of New Hollywood (London: Hutchinson 2000) and Fred Goodman's The Mansion on the Hill: Dylan, Young, Geffen, Springsteen & the Head-on Collision of Rock & Commerce (New York: Times 1997).
There are other perspectives in Columbia Pictures: Portrait of a Studio (Lexington: Uni Press of Kentucky 1992) edited by Bernard Dick and his The Merchant Prince of Poverty Row: Harry Cohn of Columbia Pictures (Lexington: Uni Press of Kentucky 1993). Fast Fade: David Puttnam, Columbia Pictures, and the Battle for Hollywood (New York: Delacorte Press 1989) by Andrew Yule covers the momentary Putnam invasion.