Samsung and Apple Make Sony & Panasonic Disappear

By Richard M. Sherwin

It’s as if for automobile fans, that BMW and Lexus had just disappeared. Imagine clothing shoppers wandering about in an empty, desolate Lord &Taylor or Bloomingdale’s store with sheer confusion. How about no Macaroni and Cheese from Trader Joe’s. Devastating, right? Try this one. Slowly but surely (despite nearly a half-century of leading the world in consumer electronics from entry level to elite categories and earning brand recognition through the most reliable, most trusted, most advanced technology) Sony and Panasonic have almost ceased to capture mind-set or even be relevant at retail.

At Samsung’s recent spring product preview at the Guggenheim, no less, they introduced a new TV commercial and new overall product theme for the ultra-hot Korean Manufacturing giant. They showed off every demographic imaginable and handled almost every consumer electronics, home and mobile product by yelling out “You’ve Gotta See This.” That theme brought back memories of the 1980s when Sony was master of the universe, where you had to see and hear the Walkman…or their most stylish or outstanding television or their first mobile phones.

My first trip to Panasonic’s Japanese manufacturing plants was where I saw the finest products with and without the Panasonic name on them, as they were also making products for other top tier brands. The Tokyo behemoth led the world in total sales of home electronics. Not only that, Panasonic had a rigid but super-successful way of testing everything a million times before releasing the product. That manifested itself in being, by far, the largest manufacturer of consumer electronics as well as the OEM of even more products for other brands. These companies appreciated Panasonic’s forthright and honest approach to manufacturing, recognizing that it would make them a profit.

But sadly, on a recent trip to P.C. Richard & Son, Best Buy, and even Sears resulted little or no store signage for Sony or Panasonic. There was little or no variety of product styles, prices features, and in some cases no products in these stores that our secret buyers either saw or wanted. Sony, which has made a mild comeback in digital cameras and Panasonic which was forced into making small appliances, were no longer the leading brands.

There was an occasional leftover model in Blue Ray players and maybe a model or two of late model TVs and audio systems, but on the whole, Samsung, LG, Vizio and others seem to own these major consumer electronics retailers.

Apple and Samsung (currently suing each other) are what people are talking about and buying.

Even online, where we were shopping for a 1080P, 120Hz mid-level TV (without Internet capabilities), we found models from Samsung to Vizio, but alas, no Panasonic entry and only a discontinued Sony model listed as the best in breed or most sought after by the consumer reviews listed under each category.

Looking back, Sony did blow the MP3 business after owning mobile audio through Walkman and not advancing the portable audio market with the same MP3 technology that Apple had. After all, Panasonic had a Tablet way before Apple ever thought about it, yet they decided to abandon the project “because it would cannibalize our PC business,” sources claim.

Additionally, both Panasonic and Sony had small, stylish mobile phones in their skunk labs (research rooms) in Japan, but were afraid to lose their world-leading home phone market and/or hurt their OEM business.

Now, we grant that Panasonic and Sony have been pulverized by Chinese audio-video manufacturers like Vizio and Hisence, who have so many loss leaders (products that actually lose money in order to gain market share). To make things worse, any technological advances that the two Japanese giants spent literally billions on to create were copied by their second and third tier Asian neighbors.

Of course, there are some people still around who remember Panasonic and Sony copying features and selling at below market rates, like stalking horses ready to knock off the original RCA, Zenith, Admiral and other iconic brands.

But somehow, Sony and Panasonic’s fall to mediocrity (or less) is, to many people – the ultimate end of an era.