Sanyo

» see sanyo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

In a Turkish electronics shop in the 1990s there was a shelf order that nobody wrote down but everybody understood. Sony and Panasonic on one level, then Sanyo and Aiwa a step below at a price a family would actually pay. Sanyo was the brand you bought when you wanted the Japanese thing and could not afford the Japanese thing. That was its whole global position, and it held it for forty years.

The origin is a family story. Toshio Iue was the brother-in-law of Konosuke Matsushita, the man who founded what became Panasonic, and he had worked inside that company for two decades. In 1947 Matsushita handed him a plant that was sitting idle and Iue started making bicycle generator lamps in it. The company was incorporated in April 1950 under the name Sanyo, three oceans, for a business that intended to sell across all of them. Washing machines and televisions followed, and by 2003 sales were running at roughly 2.5 trillion yen.

What is underrated is how much of the company was chemistry rather than electronics. Sanyo was the largest maker of rechargeable batteries on earth for years, dominant in nickel-metal hydride and then serious in lithium-ion. It built the world's first hybrid solar cell in 1992. The eneloop, launched in 2005, is the only consumer product I can think of that fixed a real complaint about rechargeable AAs, which is that they went flat in the drawer before you ever used them.

~ the case file ~

~ what panasonic was actually buying ~

By the late 2000s Sanyo had been through a bad decade. The Niigata earthquake of October 2004 wrecked a semiconductor plant while the consumer divisions were already losing money. An accounting restatement in 2007 finished off what was left of investor patience. Panasonic announced the takeover in late 2008 and completed the initial purchase on 21 December 2009 for a figure reported around 400 billion yen.

The reason was energy. Panasonic wanted the lithium-ion capacity and the solar business for a coming decade of electric cars and storage, and the television brand came along with the deal. Sanyo cells later ended up in Tesla packs through the merged Panasonic operation, which is the part of the company still doing real work under a different name.

~ the day the sign came down ~

Sanyo delisted from the Tokyo Stock Exchange on 29 March 2011. In December that year the letters came off the headquarters building in Osaka. Panasonic had already told its channel partners in November 2011 that the name would stop being used, and the deadline it gave them was 1 April 2012.

The corporate shell was left standing to settle contracts. The brand did not vanish everywhere at once. Licensees kept selling Sanyo-badged televisions in North America through Funai, and the name still turns up on products in India. What survives is a licensing arrangement rather than a company, and the company was 65 years old when a relative ended it.

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