Naver Corp., South Korea's top Internet portal operator, said Thursday its second-quarter net profit more than tripled from a year earlier, buoyed by robust revenues from mobile advertising.

Net income reached 124.1 billion won ($107 million) in the April-June period, compared with 39.4 billion won the previous year, the company said in a regulatory filing.

The figure, however, falls far short of the median estimate of 150.2 billion won in a poll by Yonhap Infomax, the financial news arm of Yonhap News Agency.

Operating profit fell 11.6 percent on-year to 167.2 billion won, while sales gained 13.8 percent to 781 billion won.

The company cited a solid gain in mobile advertising and content revenues as part of the main reasons for the upbeat performance.

Naver said it has seen a steady increase in the number of users for its mobile shopping platforms, along with the recent launch of its mobile payment tool Naver Pay in June.

The portal operator has been shifting its core business to the platform and online-to-offline  fields as new growth drivers from focusing on the flagship search engine bearing the same name.

While declining to give a specific figure for mobile ad sales, Naver said they accounted for 32 percent of search-based ads and 15 percent of display ads.

Advertising took up 72 percent of the firm's entire revenue for the three months. 

Its overall ad revenue came to 558.6 billion won in the second quarter, up 10.8 percent from a year ago. Sales from its content business, including visual media and webtoons, also grew 26.6 percent on-year to 213.1 billion won.

Naver said it will continue its efforts toward further growth, particularly from overseas with its latest services launched to target global users.

"In the second half, we will spare no efforts to achieve a meaningful result from our global services like webtoons and V," CEO Kim Sang-hun said in a statement. V is a real-time mobile broadcasting app mainly featuring K-pop singers.

The on-year drop in the operating profit came as the company spent 27.7 billion won on stock compensation costs, it said.

Naver said the planned unveiling of V, slated for August, bodes well for future growth in the remaining quarters since it is expected to be well-received in the offshore market on the back of hallyu, or the Korean Wave of pop culture.

Naver also pinned hopes on the prospect of Line Music, a paid-for music streaming service that was recently rolled out in Japan by its subsidiary Line Corp.

"Since the debut in June, we've had a cumulative 6.6 million downloads, and we anticipate that it will pioneer the digital music industry in Japan, which is the world's second-biggest market," Hwang In-joon, Naver's chief financial officer, said during a conference call.

Line, the operator of the namesake messenger app, booked 27.8 billion yen ($224.8 million) in revenue over the cited period, up 37.4 percent from a year earlier, according to its parent firm.

Its monthly average users, a key gauge of growth, rose by 6 million to 211 million worldwide. Naver said a large portion of the increase came from the Middle East, where Line recently kicked off its messenger service.

Regarding the provisions for an initial public offering, which has long been speculated in the market, Naver said the plan "remains intact but nothing has been determined yet" in terms of the timing.

Shares of Naver tumbled 13.95 percent to close at 518,000 won on the main bourse on Thursday, with the broader KOSPI losing nearly 1 percent. The earnings result came before the market opened. (Yonhap)