SEOUL-- Hankook Tire & Technology Co., the world's sixth-biggest tiremaker by sales, said Tuesday its second-quarter net profit more than doubled from a year earlier, helped by a weak won and non-core asset sale.

Net profit for the three months that ended in June jumped to 327.39 billion won (US$250 million) from 161.56 billion won a year ago, the company said in a statement.

"The won's weakness against the dollar and the sale of a property asset buoyed the quarterly bottomline," a company spokesman said.

The dollar rose to an average of 1,259.57 won in the second quarter from 1,121.23 won a year ago, according to the Bank of Korea.

Operating profit fell 6.3 percent to 175.27 billion won in the June quarter from 187.03 billion won a year ago amid an extended chip shortage. Sales rose 13 percent to 2.04 trillion won from 1.81 trillion won.

To boost sales, Hankook Tire launched the iON tire product for all-electric vehicle models in Europe in May and will bring it to the domestic market and other global markets later this year, the statement said.

Hankook Tire earns over 80 percent of its total revenue abroad. It has eight plants -- two in South Korea, one in Hungary, one in the United States, three in China and one in Indonesia -- whose combined capacity reaches 102 million tires per year.

The company plans to invest 300 billion won by 2025 in upgrading its domestic facilities and to increase its global output capacity to 150 million tires by 2030.

Source: Yonhap News Agency