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     This story was printed from CdrInfo.com,

     located at http://www.cdrinfo.com.

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Nintendo, the Japanese games maker, has credited strong sales of its latest handheld GameBoy for robust profits in the past three months.

The group said profits for the three months to the end of June had hit 11.45bn yen ($95m; £59.4m).

It gave no year-ago comparisons because this is the first time the company is reporting quarterly results.

But managing director Yoshihiro Mori said sales were up 5% on the same period last year. Nintendo added it had sold 3.24 million units of its GameBoy Advance (GBA), which had helped offset weak demand for its GameCube consoles.

Only 80,000 GameCubes were sold during the period, amid stiff competition from Sony's Playstation 2 and Microsoft's Xbox.

In May, the firm had said it hoped to sell 20 million GBA machines and six million GameCube machines worldwide by the end of its current financial year.

Nonetheless, the Kyoto-based company stuck to its forecast of profits of 65bn yen for the year - despite being hit by a 37% fall in profits last year.