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HISTORY In late 1945, after World War II, Masaru Ibuka started a radio repair shop in a bombed-damaged department store building in Nihonbashi of Tokyo. The next year, he was joined by his colleague Akio Morita and they founded a company called Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo K.K.,[5] which translates in English to Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation. The company built Japan's first tape recorder called the Type-G.[5]
In the early 1950s, Ibuka traveled in the United States and heard about Bell Labs' invention of the transistor.[5] He convinced Bell to license the transistor technology to his Japanese company. While most American companies were researching the transistor for its military applications, Ibuka and Morita looked to apply it to communications. Although the American companies Regency and Texas Instruments built the first transistor radios, it was Ibuka's company that made them commercially successful for the first time. In August 1955, Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering released the Sony TR-55, Japan's first commercially produced transistor radio.[6] They followed up in December of the same year by releasing the Sony TR-72, a product that won favor both within