What if you bought Sony in 1990?
World · Japan. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play3.5× · S&P 500 same money: $19,429
$1,000 in Sony at the start of 1990 would be worth about $3,500 today. A plain S&P 500 index fund over the same years would have made more — the boring option won.
The story
Sony invented the consumer-electronics brand as we know it, from the Walkman to Trinitron televisions, then bought Columbia Pictures in 1989 and launched the PlayStation in 1994. The PlayStation 2 and dot-com enthusiasm pushed the shares to a dizzy peak in 2000. In April 2003 a profit warning triggered the so-called Sony shock, which dragged down the whole Tokyo market, and the following decade was a slow-motion retreat: Samsung and LG won the flat-screen TV war, Apple ate the portable-music business Sony once owned, and the PlayStation Network hack of 2011 added insult. By 2012 the stock was below where it started in 1990.
The turnaround under Kazuo Hirai and later Kenichiro Yoshida was mostly subtraction. Sony sold its VAIO PC unit in 2014, shrank televisions, and leaned into what it did uniquely well: PlayStation, image sensors for other companies' phones, music publishing and anime, including the Crunchyroll purchase in 2021. Recurring revenue from games and content replaced hardware margins, and the shares climbed for most of the following decade, ending well above the 2000 peak.
The lesson: Turnarounds often come from shrinking rather than expanding; Sony recovered by exiting businesses where it had no edge and concentrating on the few where it did.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1990 | $40.00 | $3,500 | $19,429 | 3.5× |
| 1995 | $45.00 | $3,111 | $14,783 | 3.1× |
| 2000 | $140 | $1,000 | $4,626 | 1.0× |
| 2003 | $40.00 | $3,500 | $7,727 | 3.5× |
| 2005 | $37.00 | $3,784 | $5,763 | 3.8× |
| 2007 | $49.00 | $2,857 | $4,789 | 2.9× |
| 2008 | $55.00 | $2,545 | $4,626 | 2.5× |
| 2010 | $30.00 | $4,667 | $6,071 | 4.7× |
| 2012 | $18.00 | $7,778 | $5,312 | 7.8× |
| 2015 | $21.00 | $6,667 | $3,301 | 6.7× |
| 2018 | $50.00 | $2,800 | $2,519 | 2.8× |
| 2020 | $68.00 | $2,059 | $2,092 | 2.1× |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 2012, turning $1,000 into $7,778. The S&P 500 from that same year: $5,312.
On this day
Now try it without hindsight. The wheel decides the year and the asset class, you pick the position, ten seconds a pick, and we simulate to today. Sony is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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