Sony said today that its first-half net profit quadrupled despite heavy losses from its PlayStation 3, while rival Nintendo's earnings more than doubled amid a heated battle in the video game market.
Sony said its net earnings hit a record 140.17 billion yen ($123m) in the six months to September as brisk sales of electronics products such as Cyber-shot digital cameras offset huge losses in the game division.
The group's bottom line was also boosted by the absence of a big one-off charges taken by Sony the previous year to cover recalls of millions of potentially flammable laptop computer batteries.
Nintendo, meanwhile, posted net profit of 132.42 billion yen for the first half of the financial year, up 144% from a year earlier.
The Kyoto-based video game giant said it was revising its net profit projection for the year to 275 billion yen, up 12% from its earlier forecast and nearly 158% higher than the previous financial year.
Nintendo can barely keep up with demand for the Wii, which is known for its innovative motion-sensitive controller and is aimed at customers who normally would not play video games.
Nintendo said it has sold 13.17 million Wii consoles since its launch for last year's holiday season. It forecast global sales of 17.5 million Wii consoles in the year to March 2008.
Sony said it sold 1.31 million PS3s in the three months to September and kept its target to sell 11 million of the consoles globally this year But analysts are sceptical about whether it can reach that target. Sony recently cut the price of the PS3 to try to boost demand ahead of the crucial year-end shopping season.
But for now the more PS3s Sony sells, the more the losses grow in its game division, which was 96.7 billion yen in the red for the second quarter alone. Chief financial officer Nobuyuki Oneda said the company hopes to make a profit in the game unit in the next financial year after absorbing the console's huge development costs.
