In 1918, a 23-year-old Japanese entrepreneur named Konosuke Matsushita began making simple electric plugs and sockets in his home. That modest start grew into one of the largest and most diverse companies in the world, a corporate giant that at its peak dominated consumer electronics and sold products under a name nearly everyone recognized: Panasonic. But the company that once filled entire store sections with televisions, video players, and cameras has quietly changed so dramatically that many consumers no longer realize the breadth of its activities. For more than a century, Panasonic has repeatedly abandoned once-core businesses and moved into entirely new ones, a constant reinvention that has kept the company alive while making its famous brand increasingly irrelevant in the West.
The television business is perhaps the clearest example of how far Panasonic has fallen from its former position. The company began making TVs in the 1950s, but it was the 1964 Tokyo Olympics that truly motivated Japanese households to buy them. In 1974, seeking to strengthen its television division and build a presence in the American market, Panasonic acquired the Quasar brand from Motorola. Quasar had been a well-known name in the United States, but its quality and reputation had slipped as Motorola turned its attention elsewhere.
Panasonic poured money into manufacturing and design improvements and managed to revive the brand to a degree, but the Quasar name was discontinued in 2005. By then, Panasonic had found something far more promising: plasma displays. The company quickly became the world’s most respected maker of plasma televisions, capturing more than 40 percent of the market by 2010. But LCD technology proved more efficient and technically superior, and Korean rivals like Samsung and LG adapted more quickly, while Chinese manufacturers flooded the market with cheaper alternatives.
Panasonic struggled to make the transition. In 2014, it announced the end of its plasma TV production, and just two years later, it pulled out of the American television market entirely. The company eventually returned to the United States in 2024 with new OLED and mini-LED models, but the situation had changed fundamentally. As of April 2026, all Panasonic-branded televisions sold in the United States and Europe are manufactured, marketed, and distributed by the Chinese company Skyworth.
The business that once defined Panasonic is now, for the most part, someone else’s. Yet the company’s oldest business was never televisions. Panasonic’s origins lie in energy. Konosuke Matsushita’s first notable product was a light fixture that could hold two bulbs, and over the years the company expanded into batteries and battery-powered devices like clocks and flashlights.
By 2020, Panasonic claimed to have sold more than 200 billion dry batteries globally, the first and only Japanese company to reach that milestone. More recently, the energy division has focused on the automotive market. As far back as 1996, Panasonic entered a joint venture with Toyota to supply batteries for the Prius, holding a minority stake until Toyota bought it out in 2024. Panasonic also built a close relationship with Tesla beginning in 2009, and in 2016 it became the exclusive supplier of batteries for the Model 3, Tesla’s first mass-produced vehicle.
Although it is no longer an exclusive supplier, Panasonic still manufactures large volumes of electric vehicle batteries, having recently opened one of the largest battery factories in the country. Another former Panasonic business that once defined home entertainment was physical media. In the 1950s, the company acquired half ownership of the electronics manufacturer JVC, and in the 1970s, JVC effectively created the VHS format. VHS was introduced as a direct competitor to Sony’s Betamax, which had been released about a year earlier.
Even though many people believed VHS was technically inferior, it won the format war. Panasonic and JVC made agreements with other electronics companies to produce their own VHS players, and the format became so widely available that within a decade it controlled roughly 90 percent of the market. Panasonic also played a significant role in creating the DVD and the Blu-ray disc, releasing the first portable player for each format. The company still makes highly rated 4K Blu-ray players, but the steep decline of physical media has reduced this part of its business to a shadow of its former self.
The audio side of Panasonic has roots that stretch back nearly as far as the company itself. In 1930, Matsushita entered a joint venture with an existing radio manufacturer and produced a higher-end radio that was slightly more expensive and more reliable than competing models. In the 1950s, the name Panasonic itself was created as a brand for the company’s speakers, which were to be exported abroad, Pan meaning universal and sonic meaning sound. In the 1960s, the company launched a premium speaker brand called Technics, which has since been discontinued and revived.
In the 1980s, Panasonic introduced a line of personal cassette players aimed squarely at Sony’s popular Walkman. Today, the company continues to make radios, speakers, headphones, and a wide range of audio products. Another discontinued business was video games. In the 1990s, Trip Hawkins, the founder of Electronic Arts, created the 3DO, a video game console that generated enormous hype, with Time magazine naming it the best product of 1993.
Panasonic was the first and primary company licensed to manufacture it. The strategy was similar to the VHS approach: license many companies to produce the console so that it would become widely available and establish itself as the new standard. It did not work. The licensing structure drove the price to $699, and consumers stayed away.
The following year, Sony released its far more successful PlayStation, which went on to sell over 100 million units, while the 3DO sold an estimated 2 million over three years. Panasonic even paid for the exclusive rights to a potential follow-up called the M2 and reportedly came close to forming a partnership with Sega to make it a reality, but the venture never materialized. One current business that remains strong is appliances. Since the 1950s, Panasonic has manufactured just about any appliance imaginable, from large refrigerators to small rice cookers.
The availability of these products, however, depends heavily on the region of the world. In 2025, the company stopped selling refrigerators and washing machines in India, and in the United States, its focus has shifted mostly to HVAC systems, electric shavers, and small kitchen appliances like microwaves. For an American consumer looking for a Panasonic-branded product today, those are the main options. The most ambitious and short-lived of Panasonic’s ventures was its expansion into the entertainment industry itself.
By 1990, the company was already making televisions, speakers, and VCRs, so it seemed logical to expand into the production of the content people consumed on those devices. There was also external pressure: rival Sony had just acquired CBS Records and the Columbia film studio. Panasonic responded by acquiring MCA for more than $6 billion, the largest Japanese acquisition of an American company at the time. MCA owned Universal Studios and had multiple connections to the music industry.
The Hollywood production culture, however, proved a poor fit, and Panasonic sold the company only a few years later. It remains a strange historical footnote that Universal films from the early 1990s, including Jurassic Park, were made under Panasonic ownership. Panasonic’s camera business is another enduring part of the company. It has made consumer video cameras since the 1980s, and in 2001 it introduced the digital camera brand Lumix, which it has continuously sold ever since.
In 2008, Panasonic made the first mass-produced mirrorless camera, a milestone that many consumers do not associate with the brand. Mobile phones were yet another business that did not survive. In 2000, Panasonic sold over 15 million handsets, making it the fifth largest mobile phone producer in the world with a market share above 5 percent. The company publicly stated its goal of reaching the top three, but that never happened.
In 2005, poor sales forced it to discontinue selling mobile phones in foreign markets, including the United States. A brief comeback attempt in 2012, selling smartphones in select markets, collapsed the following year after heavy losses. Panasonic does still sell a wide variety of landline telephones for homes and businesses. Perhaps the most unexpected item on Panasonic’s current list of businesses is bicycles.
When Konosuke Matsushita was nine years old, he became an apprentice at a bicycle shop. In the early 1920s, one of his first breakout products was a bullet-shaped, battery-powered lamp for the front of bicycles. It worked for about 30 hours, far longer than the two to three hours customers expected from competing products. In the 1950s, Panasonic began making bicycle frames, and in the 1970s it started exporting them to the United States, followed by Europe and Australia.
The company became the first to manufacture Schwinn bicycles when Schwinn outsourced production, meaning many popular Schwinn models of that decade were actually made by Panasonic. In 1989, unfavorable dollar-yen exchange rates made the business unprofitable, and Panasonic stopped selling bicycles in North America. It continues to sell them, but mainly in Japan. The story of Panasonic is not the story of a company that failed.
It is the story of a company that changed repeatedly, shedding the businesses that made it famous and quietly moving into areas the public rarely sees. Most of the products that defined the brand for decades have been discontinued or drastically diminished, while many of its continuing operations are hidden from the public, sold under different brand names, or limited to Japan and other overseas markets. The name remains, but the company behind it is not the company most people remember.