First impressions of visits to Sony and Nintendo could not be more different. At Sony’s hi-tech HQ, young engineers sporting jeans and dyed hair come out to collect their suited visitors. At Nintendo’s base in southern Kyoto there are suits, austere white walls, and not a videogame character in sight. Yet it is Nintendo, not Sony, which is currently feted as the most innovative company in Japan.
To add insult to that injury, Nintendo, which only employs a couple of thousand people, has a higher market valuation than Sony, with a global workforce of 180,500. The market says Nintendo is worth Y5,185bn ($52bn) against the Y2,396bn value of Sony.
