PlayStation 4 sales help Sony swing to Q2 operating profit

By Makiko Yamazaki

TOKYO (Reuters) - Sony Corp swung to a second-quarter operating profit as strong PlayStation 4 videogame sales helped to offset a fall in smartphone sales and keep the company on a recovery track after years of decline in its consumer electronics business.

Sony said on Thursday its July-September operating profit came to 88 billion yen ($729 million), its best second-quarter operating profit in eight years. The profit was also a touch above the 87.3 billion yen average estimate of nine analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters.

In the same quarter last year, it booked a loss of 85.6 billion yen due to impairment charges for the mobile business.

The company said its game and networks business booked a 10 percent rise in operating profit thanks to strong PlayStation 4 software sales. It lifted the full-year profit outlook for the games business to 80 billion yen from a previous 60 billion and boosted the sales outlook for PlayStation 4 videogame consoles to 17.5 million units from 16.5 million.

Camera sensors have also played a key role in the company's recovery of the past year. The devices division, which includes image sensors, reported an operating profit of 32.7 billion yen, up 4.4 billion from a year earlier.

The upbeat results come a day after Sony agreed to acquire Toshiba Corp's image sensor business for an estimated 20 billion yen and take on about 1,100 workers from a company reeling from a $1.3 billion accounting scandal.

"This business is crucial for Sony," Kenichiro Yoshida, Sony's chief financial officer said at a press conference. "We are facing a shortage of engineers in this field. We would welcome Toshiba engineers."

Sony is hoping that its dominant position in the camera sensor market would help the company offset weaker demand for its mobile phones, TVs and other consumer electronics.

Sony's mobile phone business remained in the red, posting a 20.6 billion yen loss due to heavy competition with other Asian makers. Sony left unchanged its full-year operating profit and sales forecasts. It predicted an operating profit of 320 billion yen, a near five-fold jump, on sales of 7.9 trillion yen, down 3.8 percent.

($1 = 120.7700 yen)

(Reporting by Makiko Yamazaki; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman)