The order was worth more than his entire company. He turned it down.
In the late 1950s a purchasing agent at Bulova, the American watch company, saw Sony's pocket transistor radios and said he would take 100,000 of them.
It was the largest order the young Japanese company had ever been offered. Its value exceeded Sony's total capitalisation.
There was one condition. The radios had to carry the Bulova name, not Sony's.
Akio Morita was in New York. He cabled Tokyo.
His co-founder Masaru Ibuka and the Sony board cabled straight back, instructing him to accept.
He refused anyway.
The Bulova executive could not understand it. Nobody in America had heard of Sony. Bulova was a household name. He was offering free distribution to a brand worth nothing.
Morita's reply is the whole story:
"Fifty years ago, how many people knew your name? This is the first year of my company's fifty years history. If we don't use our name, we may not have a history."
He went home without the order.
Eventually he found a distributor willing to sell the radios as Sony, and Americans bought them.
What that refusal actually bought is bigger than one product line.
At the time, "Made in Japan" meant cheap. It was closer to a warning label. Japanese exports were understood as flimsy copies of Western goods.
Sony spent the following decades attaching its own name to things nobody had seen before, and the label changed meaning underneath it. By the 1980s, Japanese manufacturing stood for precision.
None of that happens if the first 100,000 units ship in somebody else's box.
Morita later called turning down Bulova the best business decision of his career.
Saying no cost him real money he badly needed, with no guarantee the alternative would ever appear. His own board thought he was wrong. He was not being brave with hindsight. He was being stubborn with a cash flow problem.
Every company gets offered this trade eventually. Revenue now, in exchange for being invisible.
Your name is the only asset that compounds while you sleep.
What are you shipping under somebody else's label because their cheque cleared faster?
Harsh
I build businesses with extraordinary people. I share my learnings daily on my WhatsApp Community and LinkedIn, and weekly on this Sunday Email.