Sony profit more than doubles

Sony said Thursday that its April-June net profit more than doubled to 66.46 billion yen ($551.5 million) from a year earlier on solid sales of flat-panel TVs, digital cameras and video camcorders. Sales rose 13.3% to 1.98 trillion yen ($16.41 billion).

But the Japanese electronics and entertainment company said its game operations were still in the red because of strategic pricing of the PlayStation 3 video game console below production costs.

The PlayStation 3 has been struggling against the Wii from rival Nintendo Co., which reported Wednesday that quarterly earnings soared fivefold.

Sony said it sold 710,000 PlayStation 3s worldwide for the quarter. A total of 4.3 million have been sold since the consoles went on sale late last year in Japan and the U.S., and in March in Europe. Sony’s goal is to sell 11 million PS3 machines for the fiscal year through March 2008.

Tokyo-based Sony, which also has sprawling entertainment businesses, got a boost in its movies division from the successful worldwide theater reception for “Spider-Man 3.”

A weak yen, which tends to lift the value of overseas earnings for Japanese exporters, also helped, Sony said.

Yuji Fujimori, electronics analyst at Goldman Sachs & Co. in Tokyo, said Sony’s profit was better than even his bullish expectations, underpinned by sales of digital cameras and Vaio computers that offset the risks of price declines in TVs and PlayStation 3-related losses.

Sony kept its forecast for the fiscal year through March 2008 unchanged at 320 billion yen ($2.66 billion), up 153% from the previous year, on 8.780 trillion yen ($72.86 billion) in sales, up 6% from the previous year.