TOKYO : Sony said on Thursday 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 (123 million dollars) 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 percent 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 percent from its earlier forecast and nearly 158 percent 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 11.0 million of the consoles globally this year But analysts are sceptical about whether it can reach that target.

"Given the lack of a strong title line-up, it seems to be almost impossible for the full year sales target for PS3 to be met," Mizuho Investors Securities analyst Mitsuhiro Osawa said.

"How (Sony) can pump up sales and how it can reduce losses at this division to manageable levels continue to be a major challenge from a long-term point of view," he said.

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.

Sony upgraded its full-year outlook. Net earnings are now forecast to jump 161 percent to 330 billion yen against an earlier projection of 320 billion.

Sony has been streamlining to focus on its core electronics unit. Last week it said it would sell the production lines for the powerful computer chip at the heart of the PS3 to rival Toshiba for a reported one billion dollars.

Sony has also axed thousands of jobs since Howard Stringer, a Welsh-born US citizen, took over in 2005 as the iconic Japanese company's first foreign boss. - AFP/de