Tokyo (Japan) - Sony had a rough second calendar quarter (fiscal Q1 2008 for the company) with profits plunging nearly 48% to $326.9 million while sales inched up to $18.7 billion. However, the game segment showed improvement: The business unit posted a profit and the Playstation 3 sales more than doubled over the second quarter of 2007.

Global PS3 sales came in at 1.56 million units, which is up 123% from the 700,000 units the company sold in the same quarter last year. Sony said that it had sold 14.4 million PS3 consoles by the end of June. For the complete fiscal year, Sony expects to sell about 10 million consoles, up from the 9.24 million units the company sold in fiscal 2007.

PS3 unit sales were ahead of the PS2, whose sales dropped by 43% from 2.66 million to 1.51 million units. The Playstation Portable was Sony’s best-selling game system with 3.72 million units, compared to 2.13 million units in Q2 2007. PS3 software sales more than quadrupled to 22.7 million units, while PS2 software sales fell from 31.1 million to 19.3 million units.

Revenue of Sony’s game unit increased from $1.8 billion to $2.12 billion and the Q1 2007 loss of $270 million was turned into a $49.9 million profit in Q1 2008.

Across its consumer electronics portfolio, the company saw sales of its Bravia LCD TVs increasing, but sales for compact digital cameras, compact video cameras and Vaio computers were declining. The weak dollar also had a negative impact on Sony’s bottom line, erasing $133.6 million of operating profit.