How Panasonic Lost Its Place in the Consumer Market

Walk into a Best Buy today and Panasonic is largely invisible. A few microwaves, maybe a shaver. The shelf space that once belonged to the brand — televisions, cameras, home audio — has been redistributed to Samsung, LG, and Sony. And yet the company reported revenue of over 8 trillion yen last year, which converts to more than $50 billion. Panasonic is not dying. It has simply become unrecognizable to the people who once knew it best.

That tension — a company still enormous by any financial measure, yet increasingly absent from consumer awareness — is what Company Man's recent YouTube deep-dive into Panasonic's history sets out to untangle. The framing is useful: rather than constructing a single decline narrative, the video maps five former businesses against five current ones, toggling between them to show not just what Panasonic abandoned but what it chose to become instead. The portrait that emerges is of a company whose problem is not irrelevance so much as invisibility.

The Television Trap

The television story is where the brand erosion is sharpest, and the timing matters. Panasonic controlled what Company Man describes as over 40% of the plasma display market by 2010 — a genuinely dominant position. But plasma was already losing ground to LCD technology, and the companies positioned to win the LCD transition were Samsung and LG, Korean manufacturers who moved faster. Chinese competitors, meanwhile, entered at the low end with affordable alternatives that squeezed margins from below.

When you are the undisputed leader in a format that is being displaced, the temptation is to protect your position in that format rather than cannibalize it. Panasonic did exactly that — and the delay cost them the category. They exited plasma production in 2014, then announced a full withdrawal from the US television market two years later.

The attempted 2024 comeback with OLED and mini-LED sets illustrates the depth of the problem. Returning to a market you abandoned — in a category defined by brand loyalty and retail shelf presence — is an uphill exercise under the best conditions. As of April 2026, per Company Man's reporting, Panasonic-branded televisions in the US and Europe are manufactured, marketed, and sold by a Chinese company called Skyworth. The brand persists. The business behind it has largely been handed off.

The Businesses You Never Knew Were Panasonic

Here is where the story gets more interesting, and more complicated. The video's most clarifying line comes near the end: "most of their continuing businesses are either hidden from the public, promoted under a different brand, or mostly sold in Japan or other countries."

That's not a description of a company collapsing. It's a description of a company that became B2B while the public was still looking for it on retail shelves.

Take energy. The company's origins, under founder Konosuke Matsushita, trace back to 1918 and the manufacture of electric plugs and sockets. Batteries followed — eventually billions of them, across consumer and industrial applications. The EV battery business is the contemporary expression of that lineage. Panasonic spent years as part of a joint venture with Toyota supplying batteries for hybrid vehicles; Toyota bought out Panasonic's minority stake in 2024. The Tesla relationship dates to 2009, and Panasonic became the exclusive battery supplier for the Model 3 — Tesla's first mass-market vehicle — in 2016. They're no longer exclusive, but they remain a significant supplier and recently opened one of the largest EV battery factories in the United States.

None of that registers when a consumer walks through a retail store. It registers when an automaker negotiates a supply contract.

The camera business follows a similar pattern. The Lumix brand, launched in 2001, has genuine credibility among professional and prosumer photographers. Panasonic produced the first mass-produced mirrorless camera in 2008 — a meaningful milestone in camera history — and the line remains active. But as Company Man notes, the Panasonic connection "may not be obvious," partly because Lumix carries its own identity, and partly because the camera market, like most hardware categories, is not where the brand's marketing energy goes.

The Bets That Didn't Work

The less tidy part of Panasonic's history involves the ventures that looked logical at the time and failed in practice — which tells you something about how difficult it is to correctly read where markets are heading even with significant capital and operational scale.

The 3DO console, manufactured by Panasonic in the early 1990s, is the clearest example. Trip Hawkins, founder of Electronic Arts, had designed the 3DO as an open licensing platform — any manufacturer could build the hardware, theoretically driving wide distribution. Panasonic was the first and primary licensee. The platform received serious attention, including a notable product-of-the-year recognition from Time magazine in 1993. But the open licensing model that was supposed to enable distribution instead complicated pricing, and the console launched at $699. Sony's PlayStation arrived the following year at a significantly lower price point and proceeded to sell over 100 million units. The 3DO never came close to that kind of traction.

The acquisition of MCA in 1990 is a different kind of cautionary case. MCA owned Universal Studios, and the strategic logic was coherent: Panasonic made the hardware people used to watch films and listen to music, so why not own the content as well? Competitor Sony had done exactly that, acquiring Columbia Pictures and CBS Records in quick succession. But as Company Man observes, "the Hollywood production culture proved to be a poor fit," and Panasonic sold MCA only a few years later. The irony is real — Jurassic Park was technically a Panasonic-owned production. The company just couldn't figure out what to do with the asset once it had it.

Mobile phones followed a similar arc. Panasonic had meaningful market share in handsets around 2000, then retreated from foreign markets in 2005, attempted a smartphone re-entry in 2012, and exited again the following year. They still sell landline phones. The gap between their mobile history and where the market went is perhaps the most dramatic misalignment in the company's recent record.

What the Comparison to Sony Actually Reveals

Company Man raises the Sony comparison at the end, and it's worth sitting with. Sony and Panasonic were running parallel strategies in the early 1990s — both making consumer hardware, both moving into content, both trying to position themselves as vertically integrated entertainment companies. Sony kept the content. It now owns one of the major film studios, a global music publishing empire, and a gaming platform in PlayStation that has been commercially dominant for three decades. The hardware business struggled, but the content and gaming bets compounded.

Panasonic made the same content bet and retreated. The gaming bet collapsed before it began. What remained was manufacturing expertise and a battery business that is now more strategically valuable than anyone would have predicted in 1993 — but whose value accrues almost entirely in supply chains rather than on consumer shelves.

That's not a story of failure exactly. It's a story of a company that optimized for the wrong kind of recognition. Panasonic is deeply embedded in the infrastructure of the EV transition, in professional imaging, in HVAC systems that heat and cool buildings. The revenue numbers confirm it. The brand awareness does not.

The question worth asking is whether that gap matters — and to whom. For shareholders and supply chain partners, probably not at all. For a company that spent decades building one of the most recognized names in consumer electronics, it may represent something harder to quantify: the cost of becoming essential to industries that will never put your logo on a billboard.

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By Marcus Tate, Sports Desk Editor, Buzzrag