Tokyo, Nov 9 (IANS): Japan's Toshiba Corporation incurred a net loss of 49.8 billion yen ($438 million) in the first half of its financial year, compared to a profit of 115.3 billion yen during the same period last year, an official statement released on Thursday said.

The operating income in this period rose to 231.8 billion yen, which is a record figure for the company and more than double the income made during the same period in 2016, Efe news reported.

The net sales also rose to 2.4 trillion yen, which has been attributed to the higher sales of its storage and electronic devices, although the company registered lower sales in the energy and infrastructure sectors.

However, the factor that had the greatest impact on the results was the split of the branch dealing with memory chips, the most profitable unit of the company.

Toshiba created a separate entity in April 2017 out of the unit which manufactures NAND flash memory -- that has the second largest market share in the world after Samsung Electronics -- in order to have more liquidity and offset part of the losses incurred in its nuclear operations in the United States.

The shareholders' meeting recently approved the sale of the new entity to an international consortium headed by the US investment firm Bain Capital and including companies like Apple and South Korea's SK Hynix.

The parties expect to agree on the final terms of the operations, which could be worth around 2 trillion yen, at the end of March, 2018.

Toshiba expects to end the current financial year, which ends in March, with a net loss of 110 billion yen, in comparison to the 965.7 billion yen loss it incurred in the previous financial year.

Its operating income is expected to rise to 430 billion yen, while net sales are expected to rise to 4.9 trillion yen, thereby showing a slight year-on-year increase.