Sony hasn’t been this hot since it made the Walkman

The last time Sony was worth this much on the stock market, Bill Clinton was president and the PlayStation 2 was about to debut on American store shelves.

The last time Sony was worth this much on the stock market, Bill Clinton was president and the PlayStation 2 was about to debut on American store shelves. It’s been a rough past two and a half decades for Sony, the 78-year-old company that invented the Walkman and the PlayStation and had long been an icon of consumer electronics. It largely missed the boat on the mobile phone revolution, and while the PlayStation has been profitable, production costs for other electronics have risen while demand has softened. But as opportunities arise in streaming, Sony is trying to transition from being a legacy consumer electronics company to an original content and entertainment company. The strategy is working: In the past three years, Sony’s stock (SONY) has started to break out of a decades-long slump. Sony’s stock price in Japan recently closed at the first record high since March 2000, signifying confidence in the company’s ability to evolve its game offerings and steer itself toward entertainment, Damian Thong, a research equity analyst at Macquarie, told CNN. “If you went back 30 years ago, it was an electronics company, so best known as a seller of hardware,” Thong said. “But today, the company is primarily generating profits off of entertainment, which is games, music and (TV and movies).” Sony Group, Japan’s third largest company by market value, has turned itself around by innovating its games business beyond consoles and making acquisitions to expand its IP, Joost van Dreunen, an adjunct assistant professor at NYU Stern who teaches the business of video games, told CNN.