Sony Corporation

Sony Corporation   commonly referred to as Sony, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Kōnan Minato, Tokyo, Japan. It ranked 73 on the 2011 list of Fortune Global 500. Sony is one of the leading manufacturers of electronics products for the consumer and professional markets.Sony Corporation is the electronics business unit and the parent company of the Sony Group, which is engaged in business through its four operating segments – Electronics (including video games, network services and medical business), Pictures, Music and Financial Services. These make Sony one of the most comprehensive entertainment companies in the world. Sony's principal business operations include Sony Corporation (Sony Electronics in the U.S.), Sony Pictures Entertainment, Sony Computer Entertainment, Sony Music Entertainment, Sony Mobile Communications (formerly Sony Ericsson), and Sony Financial. As a semiconductor maker, Sony is among the Worldwide Top 20 Semiconductor Sales Leaders.The Sony Group  is a Japan-based corporate group primarily focused on the Electronics (such as AV/IT products and components), Game (such as PlayStation), Entertainment (such as motion pictures and music), and Financial Services (such as insurance and banking) sectors. The group consists of Sony Corporation (holding and electronics), Sony Computer Entertainment (game), Sony Pictures Entertainment (motion pictures), Sony Music Entertainment (music), Sony/ATV Music Publishing (music publishing), Sony Financial Holdings (financial services) and others.Its founders Akio Morita and Masaru Ibuka derived the name from sonus, the Latin word for sound, and also from the English slang word "sonny", since they considered themselves to be "sonny boys", a loan word into Japanese which in the early 1950s connoted smart and presentable young men.

Net income ¥  456 billion (2012)

Total assets ¥ 13.29 trillion (2012)

Columbia Pictures

Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. (CPII) is an American film production and distribution company. Columbia Pictures now forms part of the Columbia TriStar Motion Picture Group, owned by Sony Pictures Entertainment, a subsidiary of the Japanese conglomerate Sony . It is one of the leading film companies in the world, a member of the so-called Big Six. It was one of the so-called Little Three among the eight major film studios of Hollywood's Golden Age.The studio, founded in 1919 as Cohn-Brandt-Cohn Film Sales by brothers Jack and Harry Cohn and Joe Brandt, released its first feature film in August 1922. It adopted the Columbia Pictures name in 1924 and went public two years later. The name is derived from "Columbia", a national personification of the United States, which is used as the company's logo.In its early years a minor player in Hollywood, Columbia began to grow in the late 1920s, spurred by a successful association with director Frank Capra.With Capra and others, Columbia became one of the primary homes of the screwball comedy. In the 1930s, Columbia's major contract stars were Jean Arthur and Cary Grant (who was shared with RKO Pictures). In the 1940s, Rita Hayworth became the studio's premier star and propelled their fortunes into the late 1950s. Rosalind Russell, Glenn Ford, and William Holden also became major stars at the studio.In 1982, the studio was purchased by Coca-Cola; that same year it launched TriStar Pictures as a joint venture with HBO and CBS. Five years later, Coca-Cola spun off Columbia, which merged with Tri-Star to create Columbia Pictures Entertainment. After a brief period of independence with Coca-Cola maintaining a financial interest, the combined studio was acquired by Sony in 1989.The predecessor of Columbia Pictures, CBC Film Sales Corporation, was founded in 1919 by Harry Cohn, his brother Jack Cohn, and Joe Brandt.Brandt was president of CBC Film Sales, handling sales, marketing and distribution from New York along with Jack Cohn, while Harry Cohn ran production in Hollywood. The studio's early productions were low-budget short subjects: "Screen Snapshots", the "Hall Room Boys" (the vaudeville duo of Edward Flanagan and Neely Edwards), and the Chaplin imitator Billy West. The start-up CBC leased space in a Poverty Row studio on Hollywood's famously low-rent Gower Street. Among Hollywood's elite, the studio's small-time reputation led some to joke that "CBC" stood for "Corned Beef and Cabbage."

EMI

The EMI Group, also known as EMI Music or simply EMI, is a British multinational music company headquartered in London, United Kingdom. It was the fourth-largest business group and family of record labels in the recording industry and was one of the "big four" record companies. EMI Group also has a major publishing arm, EMI Music Publishing — also based in London with offices globally. The company was once a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index but since February 2011 it has been wholly owned by Citigroup (which took the then financially troubled company over because of more than $4 billion in debt it held). EMI is a member of the RIAA & IFPI.

In November 2011 Citigroup announced a tentative deal to sell off pieces of the company with the music arm going to Vivendi's Universal Music Group for $1.9 billion and the publishing business going to a Sony/ATV consortium for around $2.2 billion. Other members of the Sony consortium include Blackstone and Abu Dhabi-owned investment fund Mubadala. Both before and after the sale announcement, Universal Music Group pledged to sell off EMI assets to the value of half a billion Euros.

EMI (Electric and Musical Industries) Ltd was formed in March 1931 by the merger of the Columbia Graphophone Company and the Gramophone Company, with its "His Master's Voice" record label, firms that have a history extending back to the origins of recorded sound. The new vertically integrated company produced sound recordings as well as recording and playback equipment.

The company's gramophone manufacturing led to forty years of success with larger-scale electronics and electrical engineering. Alan Blumlein, a skilled engineer employed by EMI, conducted a great deal of pioneering research into stereo sound recording, however many years prior to the perfection of the medium in the early '50s, he was killed in 1942 whilst conducting trials on an experimental H2S radar unit. During and after the Second World War, the EMI Laboratories in Hayes, Hillingdon developed radar equipment and guided missiles, employing analogue computers. The company later became involved in broadcasting equipment, notably providing the first television transmitter to the BBC. It also manufactured broadcast television cameras for British television production companies, mostly the BBC, although the commercial television ITV companies used them as well alongside cameras made by Pye and Marconi. Their most famous piece of broadcast television equipment was the EMI 2001 colour camera, which became the mainstay of both the BBC and several ITVcompanies in the 1970s and early 1980s.

In 1958 the EMIDEC 1100, Britain's first transistorised computer, was developed at Hayes under the leadership of Godfrey Hounsfield. In the early 1970s, Hounsfield developed the first CAT scanner, a device which revolutionised medical imaging. In 1973 EMI was awarded a prestigious Queen's Award for Technological Innovation for what was then called the EMI scanner, and in 1979 Hounsfield won the Nobel Prize for his accomplishment. After brief, but brilliant, success in the medical imaging field, EMI's manufacturing activities were sold off to other companies, notably Thorn (see Thorn EMI). Subsequently development and manufacturing activities were sold off to other companies and work moved to other towns such as Crawley and Wells.

Emihus Electronics, based in Glenrothes, Scotland, was owned 51% by Hughes Aircraft, of California, U.S., and 49% by EMI. It manufactured integrated circuits and, for a short period in the mid-1970s, made hand-held calculators under the Gemini name.

Revrnue £ 1.072 billion (2010)

The Coca-Cola Company

The Coca-Cola Company (NYSE: KO) is an American multinational beverage corporation and manufacturer, retailer and marketer of non-alcoholic beverage concentrates and syrups.The company is best known for its flagship product Coca-Cola, invented in 1886 by pharmacistJohn Stith Pemberton in Columbus, Georgia.The Coca-Cola formula and brand was bought in 1889 by Asa Candler who incorporated The Coca-Cola Company in 1892. Besides its namesake Coca-Cola beverage, Coca-Cola currently offers more than 500 brands in over 200 countries or territories and serves over 1.7 billion servings each day.The company operates a franchised distribution system dating from 1889 where The Coca-Cola Company only produces syrup concentrate which is then sold to various bottler sthroughout the world who hold an exclusive territory. The Coca-Cola Company owns its anchor bottler in North America, Coca-Cola Refreshments.The Coca-Cola Company is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, United States. Its stock is listed on the NYSE and is part of DJIA, S&P 500 Index, the Russell 1000 Index and the Russell 1000 Growth Stock Index. Its current chairman and chief executive is Muhtar Kent.The company has a long history of acquisitions. Coca-Cola acquired Minute Maid in 1960,the Indian cola brand Thums Up in 1993,and Barq's in 1995. In 2001, it acquired the Odwalla brand of fruit juices, smoothies and bars for $181 million. In 2007, it acquired Fuze Beverage from founder Lance Collins and Castanea Partners for an estimated $250 million.The company's 2009 bid to buy a Chinese juice maker ended when China rejected its $4.2 billion bid for the Huiyuan Juice Group on the grounds that it would be a virtual monopoly. Nationalism was also thought to be a reason for aborting the deal. In 1982 Coca-Cola made its only non-beverage acquisition, when it purchased Columbia Pictures for $692 million. It sold the movie studio to Sony for $1.5 billion in 1989.In the U.S., Coca-Cola is a major lobbying force working to gain favorable legislation for the beverage industry. In both 2005 and 2006, it spent $1 million each year on lobbying. In 2007 that increased to $1.7 million, and by 2008, to $2.5 million. In 2009, total lobbying expenses jumped to $4.5 million, or nearly double the previous year. Much of the increased lobbying expenses are due to the industry’s fight against increased taxes on soft drinks and other sweetened beverages.For 2009, Coca-Cola has 38 lobbyists at 7 different firms lobbying on its behalf.Coca-Cola sponsored the English Football League from the beginning of the 2004–05 season (beginning August 2004) to the start of 2010/11 season, when the Football League found a new sponsor in NPower.Along with this, Coca-Cola sponsored the Coca-Cola Football Camp, otherwise known as a soccer camp, that took place in Pretoria, South Africa during the 2010 FIFA World Cup, during which hundreds of teenagers from around the world were able to come together and share their love of the game, partly due to Best Buy's efforts through their @15 program.Other major sponsorships include NASCAR, the NBA, the PGA Tour, NCAA Championships, the Olympic Games, the NRL, the FIFA World Cups and the UEFA Euro.In the Philippines, it has a team in the Philippine Basketball Association, the Powerade Tigers.The company sponsors the hit Fox singing-competition series American Idol. Coca-Cola is a sponsor of the nightly talk show on PBS,Charlie Rose in the US.

Net inome $ 8.634 billion (2011)
Total assets $ 79.974 billion (2011)

Nikon

Nikon Corporation also known as just Nikon, is a Japanese multinational corporation headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, specializing in optics and imaging. Its products include cameras,binoculars, microscopes, measurement instruments, and the steppers used in the photolithography steps of semiconductor fabrication, of which it is the world's second largest manufacturer.The companies held by Nikon form the Nikon Group.Among its products are Nikkor imaging lenses (forF-mount cameras, large format photography, photographic enlargers, and other applications), the Nikon F-series of 135 film SLR cameras, the Nikon D-series of digital SLR cameras, the Coolpix series of compact digital cameras, and the Nikonos series of underwater film cameras. Nikon's main competitors in camera and lens manufacturing include Canon, Casio, Kodak, Sony, Pentax, Panasonic, Fujifilm and Olympus.Founded in 25 July 1917 as Nippon Kōgaku Kōgyō Kabushikigaisha ("Japan Optical Industries Co., Ltd."), the company was renamed Nikon Corporation, after its cameras, in 1988. Nikon is one of the companies of the Mitsubishi Group.Nikon Corporation was established on 25 July 1917 when three leading optical manufacturers merged to form a comprehensive, fully integrated optical company known as Nippon Kōgaku Tōkyō K.K. Over the next sixty years, this growing company became a manufacturer of optical lenses (including those for the first Canon cameras) and equipment used in cameras, binoculars, microscopes and inspection equipment. During World War II the company grew to nineteen factories and 23,000 employees, supplying items such as binoculars, lenses, bomb sights, and periscopes to the Japanese military.In Japan, Nikon runs the Nikon Salon exhibition spaces, runs the Nikkor Club for amateur photographers (to whom it distributes the series of Nikon Salon books), and arranges the Ina Nobuo Award, Miki Jun Award and Miki Jun Inspiration Awards.

Net income ¥ 27.3 billion (2011)

Panasonic

Panasonic Corporation  is a Japanese multinational electronics corporation headquartered in Kadoma, Osaka, Japan.Its main business is in electronics manufacturing.Panasonic was founded in 1918 by Konosuke Matsushita as a vendor of duplex lamp sockets.It has grown to become one of the largest Japanese electronics producers, alongside Sony, Toshiba and Canon. In addition to electronics, Panasonic offers non-electronic products and services such as home renovation services. Panasonic was ranked the 89th-largest company in the world in 2009 by the Forbes Global 2000 and is one of theworld's 20 largest semiconductor vendors.From 1935 to October 1, 2008 the company name was "Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd."On January 10, 2008, the company announced that it would change its name to "Panasonic Corporation", with effect from October 1, 2008 to conform with its global brand name "Panasonic".The name change was approved at a shareholders' meeting on June 26, 2008 after consultation with the Matsushita family.Panasonic sells audio products for cars and light trucks under the Panasonic brand (aftermarket) and as OEM equipment in automobile brands including Toyota, Honda and Subaru and those of General Motors and Volkswagen.Panasonic is ranked in joint 9th place (out of 15) in Greenpeace’s Guide to Greener Electronics, which ranks electronics manufacturers on policies and practices to reduce their impact on the climate, produce greener products, and make their operations more sustainable.The company is one of the top scorers on the Products criteria, praised for its good product life cycles and the number of products which are free from polyvinyl chloride plastic (PVC). It also scores maximum points for the energy efficiency of its products with 100 percent of its TVs meeting the latest Energy Star standards and exceeding the standby power requirement.However, Panasonic's score is let down by its low score on the Energy criteria, with the Guide stating it must focus on planned reductions of greenhouse gases (GHG), set targets to reduce GHG emissions by at least 30% by 2015 and increase renewable energy use by 2020.

Net income ¥ 773 billion (2012)

Total assets ¥ 6.601 trillion (2012)