Operations After Acquisition By Sony
The company slid towards bankruptcy until it was purchased by competitor Sony Corporation. As of October 1, 2002, Aiwa ceased to be a separate company and became a wholly owned division of Sony. The company retained a logo from the mid-1990s which was used for a very short time.
Sony's reasoning for acquiring the company is unclear, other than that it was already a shareholder in Aiwa Corporation. However, Aiwa was eligible for a tax refund in Japan for fiscal year 2002, which offset the dropping figures in Sony's financial report for fiscal years 2002 and 2003. In January 2003, Sony announced the rebranding and relaunch of Aiwa as a "youth focused, PC-centric" electronics brand. A new logo was presented to the world's media along with a statement of Sony's intention to invest in and "revitalize" the Aiwa brand.
The direction proposed was to capitalize on the growing trend among personal-computer-literate teenagers and young adults to use their PCs for all forms of entertainment (television, films, music, chat), an area in which Sony itself was struggling primarily due to the heavy copyright protections it imposed upon its products.
Since 2004, however, Sony seemingly began rolling back its support for the Aiwa brand, and by 2005 Aiwa products remained on sale in only selected territories around the globe. In 2006, Aiwa products were discontinued and no longer sold in the market.
As of September 2011, the Aiwa website still existed to provide customer-support telephone numbers for some territories and regions, but it also contained many broken links and blank pages. In other regions, such as Europe, it redirected to a page on the Sony website stating that the Aiwa website had closed. The last apparent update to the website was in June 2008.
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