Masaru Ibuka was clearing out a bomb-damaged department store in Nihonbashi, Tokyo in May 1946 when he recruited 20 engineers and technicians to join a new venture he was forming with his former colleague Akio Morita. The initial capital was 190,000 yen — approximately $530 at the 1946 exchange rate. The company's first product, a rice cooker improvised from a wooden box and aluminum electrodes, burned rice rather than cooked it. They threw it out and moved on to repairing radios for customers who had managed to keep working sets through the war. Ibuka had a clear technical vision: Japan needed to manufacture products that required engineering precision rather than cheap labor, because cheap-labor competition from elsewhere in Asia would eventually undercut any manufacturing advantage built on cost. He was thinking about export markets when most Japanese industrialists were focused on domestic reconstruction. The name Sony — coined by combining the Latin "sonus" with the American slang "sonny" — was deliberately chosen to be pronounceable in any language without a Japanese accent, a marketing decision made in 1958 when the company still had a fraction of its current scale. The transistor radio breakthrough in 1955 defined Sony's first decade. When Western Electric licensed transistor technology to Japanese manufacturers Sony was among the first to acquire the license. The TR-55, Japan's first commercially produced transistor radio, was followed by the TR-63 in 1957 — a pocket-sized model that was genuinely pocket-sized rather than the marketing fiction of competitors who called their radios "pocket" despite being too large to fit in a standard shirt pocket. Morita reportedly had shirts made with larger pockets to demonstrate the claim during American sales calls. A 1957 approach from a major American retailer offering to buy 100,000 transistor radios if Sony would sell them under the retailer's private label was rejected by Morita personally. He wanted Sony on the box or no deal. The retailer walked away. Morita later described that decision as the moment Sony committed to being a brand company rather than a contract manufacturer — a choice that defined every subsequent decade of the company's consumer electronics strategy.