Bandai Co., the nation's biggest toy maker, said Thursday its group pretax profit jumped 34.5 percent to 1.99 billion yen in the year that ended March 31 thanks to brisk sales in Japan and abroad.

Bandai said group sales rose 5 percent to 227.93 billion yen on a 2.3 percent gain in domestic sales and a hefty 20.1 percent rise in overseas sales.

Behind the strong revenues were brisk sales of game software and character toys, such as Power Rangers and Gundam, in the U.S. and European markets, it said.

But on the bottom line, the company posted a 17.5 percent fall in group net profit due mainly to a big drop in extraordinary profits from the previous year.

In the previous year, the company reported special profits resulting from unexercised stock purchase warrants attached to its bonds and from capital gains from the sale of its affiliates' stockholdings.

Stock purchase warrants were booked as expenses when the bonds were issued, but booked as profits when they were not exercised at the time of bond redemption.

Bandai said its group net profit per share stood at 217.62 yen, down from 265.47 yen the previous year.

The company will pay a full-year dividend of 30 yen per share, including an interim dividend of 15 yen already paid. It paid the same full-year dividend the previous year.

For the current year, Bandai forecasts a group net profit of 12 billion yen and a group pretax profit of 23.5 billion yen on sales of 235 billion yen.