Japan's Sharp Corporation said today that hot demand for large flat-panel televisions helped boost its net profit by 27.5% to a record high in the six months to September.
Japan's leading maker of liquid crystal display (LCD) panels and televisions posted net profit of 46.54 billion yen ($390.5m) for the first half of the year, as revenue grew 9.7% to an all-time high 1.47 trillion yen. Operating profit increased 20.1% to 90.17 billion yen.
Sales of LCD colour TVs, mainly large-size models, and mobile phones drove the sales increase, the Osaka-based company said.
Flat-panel televisions are proving hot-sellers in Japan as fierce competition drives down prices and consumers become less cautious as the economy crawls out of a slump stretching back over a decade.
Sharp said its sales of audiovisual equipment increased 14.4% in the first half to 587.8 billion yen. Sharp said it would work to further improve the competitiveness of LCD colour TVs by continuing to shift to larger-screen TVs.
The company said it sold 2.52 million LCD TVs during the six months, up 46% from a year earlier. Mobile handset sales rose 5% year-on-year to 6.2 million.
Sharp reiterated it aims to sell six million LCD TVs and 13 million handsets for the full year ending March 2007. It left its previous forecasts for the full year to March unchanged for a net profit of 100 billion yen, operating income of 80 billion yen and revenue at 3 trillion yen.
