Thank you very much for participating our earnings briefing session. We are going to announce the 27th fiscal year earnings results. The first one is, finally, we are going to enter into the spot work space. That's something we have made announcement. They're being very successful. We have not been just taking wait-and-see attitude. Since five years ago or so, we've been discussing to enter into this field. However, there have been other new businesses as well, so and of course, there has been this existing player, and we wanted to make sure we clearly differentiate ourselves when we are going to enter into this business as a latecomer or as a follower. These details cannot be announced at this moment, but we are now getting fully prepared to enter into this space.
In fiscal year 2023, the market size was JPY 20 billion, which will become JPY 100 billion equivalent by 2027. This is quite an attractive market. In that sense, as a player to take on this new challenge, we want to become the number one player in the future. We are strongly determined to make it happen. We believe we have a possibility to win. As our first step, we'd like to leverage the 20-year equivalent careers we've been able to develop in this field. We have been able to acquire a lot of customers and users, which should be considered as very strong strength. Another strength we have is the salespeople. We have many salespeople. We have as many as 2,000 salespeople.
We are not only saying we have a lot of salespeople, but we've been able to accumulate know-how and build stronger teamwork. All of these employees are strongly connected based on our philosophy. We believe this can be considered as a strong weapon we have to enter into this spot work space. We are going to enter into this market. We believe that we are the number one in non-fixed term workers. Of course, they should be sometimes looking for spot works. If that's the case, we are going to introduce them job opportunities with which they can be paid on a daily basis. The spot work space. We have strong customer base, a lot of many number of users, and strong sales structure. With these strong three pillars, we are now determined to enter into this field.
Please have high expectation. Let me move on. This is something we announced last year. This is a service we are going to release this year. By the way, 5.3, we are expecting to release in fall, autumn this year. The other product we are going to release is AI-Agent. Finally, starting from May this year, we are going to release on a test basis. This is a service we announced last year. We've been continuously working on development. Originally, we were expecting to release the test version last year, but this is a new service, so we have had to keep tuning, polishing the product. Now, we expect that we are going to have five phases or levels for this service.
Now we are reaching level two, where we can understand the user's needs through a dialogue and make specific proposals. Demonstrational video is available, please take a look. This is a prototype of AI-Agent. Let me introduce the basic functions. First of all, you can search job through conversation. AI will give you three options, and you can just choose one of them. You do not need to text, and you can have a quick conversation. In addition, you can input free text to tell what kind of job you are looking for. AI will understand, sort out your needs, and have better understanding. You can talk to the AI anytime you want and anything you want. For example, if you are having trouble with interview, you can just ask the AI.
No matter what kind of question you ask, the AI will deep dive the situation and provide you appropriate advices. The conversation can be anything. It may not need to be something directly linked to your job. You can find the right job you are looking for. Through dialogue, your vague need will become clear. Based on DIP's rich e-job information data, AI will figure out the right one for you. You may be able to find the job you may not be able to find only on yourself. New era is starting to find the right job. DIP AI-Agent who will always be there for you to find the right job. That is how it will look like. It's going to be a totally new concept. Through a conversation dialogue, AI will tell you the right job.
This AI-Agent will be available for Spot Baitoru, Spot Works as well. Potential users' potential needs will become clear, and users' long-term growth should be taken into consideration when finding the new job. That's what AI-Agent will make it happen. We believe that we are going to be able to play another role. Now, let's talk about Mr. Shohei Ohtani. He has become our brand ambassador. We'd like to share what kind of big effect he's been able to let us achieve. The publicity. Well, the timing was right. When we announced this contract that happened to be on the same day. Well, we intentionally made the announcement on the same date when the announcement of he joining the baseball team.
We could hold a interview, and the interview was aired by 60 TV programs, and in total two hours. Other than that, the interview video was viewed by 4 million times. This interview became very popular, and the advertising conversion rate achieved JPY 1.65 billion. The contract, compared to other celebrities, the contract price was much higher, we have to say. As a result, we've been able to be talked about a lot. At this moment, we are feeling that the effect, the size of effect has been very enough. It's just new, so we are going to keep exposing him more in the future. Talking about the effect, for example, talking about dip awareness as a company.
Before the commercial, it was 64%, now become 74%. Our corporate awareness has become much higher. The TV commercial, this is advertising the company, the corporation. After the corporate TV commercial, we've been airing the product TV commercial as well, including Baitoru and Hatarako net. As a result, the effect for these e-commercials have become much higher. As you see on this page, the number of visits and the number of applications for these products have increased significantly. A TV program called Showtime, MLB information program we are sponsoring. Next is about improving the productivity by leveraging AI technologies. On a company-wide basis, we've been leveraging more AI technologies to further improve our productivity. The title is DIP AI Force, we are going to further accelerate this initiative.
This year's target is to reduce one hour per head count, and in total, or 500,000 hours we are aiming to reduce. This is going to be applied to engineers, sales, planning people, and everyone in our company. We're going to proactively leverage AI technologies to further improve our productivity. New grads this year, we have welcomed 315. All of them joined us on April 1st. Almost all of them are going to be working as salespeople. 290 are going to work as our sales. Compared to last year new grads, this year, the number is going to be much less.
By leveraging more AI technologies, the productivity is going to be higher and as much as possible, we'd like to achieve as big as possible with as less number of people as possible. We're going to keep developing, nurturing these 315 new grads. Our training was held for these new grads last year in Tokyo, last month in Tokyo. This month, we have had another training at Atami, a little bit far away from Tokyo, or like, again, inviting all of the new grads. This is kind of a culture we have. Those new grads participating these trainings, their mindset, motivation has become much higher. Next is about strengthening management structure. Almost no change compared to last year, Mr. Kazuhisa Iwata is now newly appointed as Audit and Supervisory Committee Member and Director.
Next, let us introduce our CXOs. We have newly established what we call CPO, Chief Philosophy Officer, because we are managing our business based on our philosophy. To make sure this philosophy, the penetration is going to be higher in the future, we have appointed Ms. Mayuko Ueno. She is going to be the first female CXO in dip. She joined us in 2007, and she's been working in our sales team and HR team. Our strength, the dip general or meeting, she's been leading to hold these meetings. As CIO and CTO, we have appointed Mr. Takatomo Suzuki. DIP AI Force, he's been making a lot of effort. He's been contributing a lot for this new service. That's it from me.
This is Shidachi speaking. From this point onward, I would like to take over and present it. First of all, I would like to give you an update on the Q4 consolidated results. For the Q4 , sales grew by 7% and OP grew by 44%. We were able to achieve JPY 2.9 billion in OP. That was because the cost suppression was doing quite successful. We were able to improve on the operating profit margin. In terms of the market environment, for the part-time job advertisement market, since the second half of last year, it was quite weak. However, we think it has hit the bottom in December. Starting from January onwards, we're starting to see some recovery, mainly in the restaurant industry.
On a segment-by-segment basis for the DX business, sales grew by 24%, and our segment profit grew by 41%. It's doing very well. For the personal recruiting service, sales grew by 5%. For the Q3 , the growth was 4.5%, so we're seeing some improvement. The segment profit was +56%, which is an increase by JPY 1.5 billion. That was mainly driven by the more efficient ads and promotion costs. In addition to that, the promotion costs for Mr. Ohtani was included in the corporate-wide adjustment. Therefore, that was the big reason for the large increase in profit.
Next, in ads and promotion costs, we have been very efficient on the ads and promotion costs, and the ad expense ratio has gone down by 5 point. As was explained from Mr. Tomita, our CEO, the corporate branding ad of Mr. Ohtani was aired along with the service commercial. Because of that, we're seeing higher effect for the existing services commercial, and we're seeing more applications. In terms of the personnel expense ratio, it's almost the same as the Q4 as last year. We gave a provision JPY 350 million of special bonus in the Q4 , but we did not pay that in the Q4 of this year. Even excluding that, we were able to suppress the personnel costs.
So, we have been thoroughly managing the costs, including the mid-career hiring. Next, I'm moving on to the consolidated result. Compared to the forecast revised in January, we were able to exceed both revenue and profit. At the time of the January for media services, we were expecting the growth for January and February to be about 1% compared to the previous year. With the promotion of Mr. Ohtani, the salespeople were highly motivated. As a result of that, for January and February in average, the growth was about 7%. We saw an upside of sales by about JPY 500 million. On top of that, we were able to suppress some ads and promotion costs.
Therefore, we saw an upside of JPY 800 million in operating profit. Now I would like to talk about the full year forecast for this fiscal year. This is the forecast for this fiscal year. The assumption of the sales growth is 7%. We are looking, having a conservative view on the part-time job advertisement market. To be more specific, last period's market growth was +2%. That will be the growth for the previous year. For this fiscal year, we're expecting the market growth to be 0%, and that was the assumption of the forecast. The operating profit growth is 5%.
That is because we have a conservative forecast on the sales. We have new services being developed like White Label Free and AI-Agent. We have a total of 700 million JPY that is related to the cost of developing AI usage internally. We want to make those investments that will translate into the future growth. I hope you will have a full understanding. Just for your reference, I would like to talk about the part-timers market. You're seeing the new job openings compared to the previous year, and I would like to give you more details. After April this year, the market growth is expected to improve. That is our view.
The reason is because we've, we think that the market has bottomed in December of last year. In addition to that, after April of last year, the market growth rate is very low, as you can see on this chart. Because of that, on a year-on-year basis, the hurdle is lower. That is our understanding. Because of that, the assumption of a market growth rate of 0%, which is the assumption of the forecast, we believe is a conservative assumption. Moving on to the expenses. Starting from the personnel expenses, the new graduates this year were 315. As mentioned by Tomita-san, it was much lower than 600 last year.
The mid-career hires are lower by 100 people, and we're expected to hire about 70 this year. As a result of that, the headcount will not increase that much compared to the beginning of the year, compared to the end of the year. Therefore, we think we can suppress the personnel expenses. The other costs are shown here on the chart, so I will skip the explanation. Next, I would like to move on and talk about the business overview of each business. Starting from the DX business. The DX business sales are 24% growth compared to the previous year, so we're seeing a steady growth.
The sub products, especially, the KOBOT, that is, promotion support, is doing really well. Which I showed in this slide. I would like to show you the results for the Q4 . Sorry, the KPIs within the performance. If you could now look at the KPIs, please. For the Q3 , if you look at the number of companies, we were able to grow by 500 companies, and this was a driver in delivering the performance. I would like to now move on and talk about the strategies for this fiscal year.
For the part-time recruitment ads, the low-end brands, for the especially the mid and small-sized companies, although we cross-sell, the DX products may not be purchased along with the mid-end products. Targeting these customers, we are going to launch a product that combines the advertisement for recruiting a DX product in the H2 . Especially, with that, we think we can drive the expansion of the low-end products. When you think of that, the number of contracted companies, we think we can grow much further, and that is our first strategy. For next year, as a preparation, for the large customers. Well, we built KOBOT for the SMEs, and we were selling those KOBOTs.
But for the larger enterprises, we are adding some functions for the interview scheduling KOBOT. Even for the existing large enterprises, we would like to start the sales, and we would like to drive this seriously. I hope you would continue expecting for that. The second strategy is for the promotion support, we have MEO KOBOT, and this is the core product for this area. After three months after the implementation, you are able to see the actual result, and we see that as a track record, and we think this is going to sell well. We're going to increase dedicated sales for DX to drive the expansion even more.
By doing this, we think we can expand the sales even further. This is the plan for this fiscal year for DX business. As I mentioned, based on the strategy, we're expecting the number of contracted companies will grow dramatically, and by doing so, we can grow the sales. Also, in order to capture the new customers for MEO KOBOT, we're going to increase the dedicated sales reps for DX, and that would mean the increased personal cost. The segment of profit growth will be a little bit more moderate compared to the sales growth. That was it for the DX business, and I would like to now talk about the progress of the personal recruiting services business.
I would like to talk about media business as well as permanent placement business. Starting from the media business, this is the sales. Compared to the previous year, the sales grew by 4.9%. The market is negative growth, as you see, so it means that we're constantly gaining our market share. Next is regarding the number of contracted companies, and we are able to constantly grow the number of contracted companies. In terms of the contract unit price, we're continuing with a minus trend compared to the previous year. Following the Q3 , it was still negative in the Q4 . That is because the small customers that have low ASP has grown, and therefore the overall ASP has gone down.
The dispatching agencies and the BPOs that used to have higher ASPs are now seeing the ASP decline, and those are the reasons. In the material, you see the user-related KPIs. These are trending quite well, so I will skip the explanation. Now I would like to move on and jump to page 37 and talk about the challenges and the strategies for the media services for this fiscal year. I have clarified it and by separating it to challenges and strategies. The first key strategy is to improve productivity. As I mentioned earlier, the productivity per person being higher is the challenge for media business.
Using the role-playing tools or negotiation analysis tools using AI, the junior sales reps are able to improve their consultative capabilities, and we think we can improve the productivity that way. This is already implemented. The second strategy is that last year, in the area of BPO and dispatching business market, there was a sudden worsening of the market, and we were not able to flexibly change our sales strategies, and that's a learning. For the growth industry, we are preparing the strategies, and we will be executing this. Along with that, the promotions targeting these industries will also be reinforced. The third strategy is regarding the market share for suburban rural areas.
Compared to the metropolitan areas, suburban areas and rural areas, market share is still low. By increasing the direct sales force and increasing the distributor network, we want to grow the market share. That was all for the media business. Moving on to the permanent placement business. Well, the sales grew by 13.7%, and Q3 grew by 3.0%. The growth pace is accelerated. That is because nursing care, Kaigo de Hatarako, that we launched last year, is doing well, and that's allowing us to enjoy faster sales growth. Moving on to the strategy for the permanent placement service. One is to improve the productivity of the career advisors.
The productivity per person is still low for the career advisor, and that is the challenge. By having a training organization for the new graduates being ramped up this year, we want to quickly develop the new graduates without lowering the productivity of the existing employees. Like with the media services, we will use AI-powered tools like negotiation analysis and role-playing tools. By also improving the UI for customer companies and facilities database, we will allow the career advisors to search the candidates more easily to improve the productivity. Second, is that we will be reinforcing the promotion for medical and nursing care for media.
The core industries in media would be medical and nursing care, and the promotion for those industries will be re-reinforced. That way, we expect the inflow into the permanent placement service will increase because the medical and nursing care related users will increase. We expect some synergy for those two businesses. That will be all for my presentation. Thank you very much.
The year-end dividend last year was JPY 48 . The previous year, that was JPY 38 , meaning that we increased the year-end dividend by JPY 10 . This year, our plan is to return the same. JPY 88 in total is the plan we have. The total shareholder return payout ratio is going to be 65% or higher. Talking about the special shareholder benefit, Mr. Ohtani's QUO card, a kind of prepaid card, will be the gift. We will be giving the QUO cards clear holder, clear file, and we also have calendars for our customers. Once we make this announcement, actually, the number of shareholders, individual or shareholders, increased a lot. Compared to August last year, when we still did not have contract with Mr. Ohtani, the number of individual or shareholders increased by 17,000.
The number of retail or individual shareholders is 33,000. Mr. Ohtani is playing an important role here as well. Every year, we are showing you the video of our general meeting. This year, more than 3,000 employees have participated this meeting, the meeting has provided a lot of satisfaction among our employees. We want to share the full version, but since there's limited time, actually, the meeting took place for 6.5 hours, so we're going to share you a 14-minute version. Please take a look. Innovation is the corporate philosophy of DIP. When I established this company, what I wanted to achieve was to materialize ideas and create innovation, which has become our corporate philosophy. I believe you have joined our company feeling sympathy to this philosophy.
Why this desire, create innovation, which has anyway been our desire since our establishment, has to be this year's theme? The answer is because this year is going to be a year when we need to take on the greatest challenge ever since our establishment. Till now, we have been creating various innovations. We established a portal website for job seekers to search for a temp staff job. We developed an environment where part-timers can find their job online when the only option they had was to rely on paper-based free media. The scale of the innovation we are aiming to create this year is going to be an unprecedented one. Bringing AI-Agent into the society is an innovation on a global basis. I am not saying this is going to be a greater challenge for DIP. It is much greater.
We are talking about a globally great innovation which is going to change the world. With a new idea which our competitor does not have as a weapon, DIP is finally entering into this new business. Today, DIP is announcing a long-awaited new service. It is Baitoru Free. Our competitor is no longer only Talent Work. It is no longer only Indeed. Strong players like Timee and Mercari are becoming our new competitors. We have not been taking wait-and-see attitude. Five years ago, I decided to join this market and shared the idea at our board meeting. We have been getting prepared. You may say, why five years later we still do not have the product? There have been various situations taking place, and even very recently, the team is re-working on the product to fundamentally change the product. It has been taking time following these various situations.
My idea itself, although I cannot share the specifics till we actually release the service, we are filing for a patent. If we are any way going to enter into this existing market, I want to do so while making sure our service is clearly differentiated. By the way, having a differentiated service is not the only reason we can win. There are three more. Can you think of any of them? Please raise your hand if you can. It is you. Your career, know-how, and teamwork. Our employees' quality and power, which have been developed through our long-term history. This is the greatest factor which makes me confident to become the winner. The other strength is our customers.
The trust relationship you've been able to create with our customer, the number of customers and the relationships we have been able to build with our customers and users. You've been able to create a great relationship with our users by working on various initiatives, including raise the hourly wage, do away with age bias, and by focusing on user first. Through these initiatives, we've been able to build great relationships with our users and gain loyalty from them. I believe we are much stronger here. Latecomer is said to be disadvantaged, but I believe we have enough strength to catch up with them, and I am actually confident to make it happen. We are going to win in this market seriously, making a bet to our future. The 28th fiscal year, DIP General Meeting, we will create a new era, take on a challenge as innovator.
At the end of 2022, when generative AI was making a breakthrough, DIP made an announcement to enter into AI-Agent business. A big dream is making a step forward to enter into a new era. I am sure, Professor Matsuo, various people have been wanting to work with you. Under such a circumstance, why you chose us? Well, basically, I'd like to cooperate with people who are aiming to improve the society. We have to make changes. I believe personal market has very strong affinity with generative AI. People are wanting to work with job satisfaction. There has been no technologies to make it happen. Now, we are living in an era where workers' liquidity is high and where various new careers are being developed.
There has been no service telling these workers how you can find a job which will provide you job satisfaction. If AI can provide a solution here, I believe the market can be gigantic or a tremendous change can be expected. I have been working in the internet industry for more than 25 years. The higher the internet penetration has been, the more convenient society has been. However, Japanese people's happiness level has just kept declining. This should mean although internet has been improving the convenience, it has not been contributing to make people happier. Now with AI technologies, I believe for the first time in our life, now there is a possibility that there can be a solution to improve job satisfaction and that people live a more meaningful lives. Agree.
I believe the role we are going to play in the future is going to be different compared to the role we've been playing till now. Till now, it's been the user side who's been choosing the job from the list we've been providing. But from now on, it is going to be us who is going to work on the matching after having good understanding of the user, including where is the geographical area the user is working to work and make a proposal, recommend the very right job to the user. We will even provide support to the user's future. This is going to be a new business model. This exactly means we are going to provide matching to enable users achieving happiness. Now we are working together with Matsuo Institute to develop AI-Agent.
As our first step, we asked the Institute to define what kind of evolution we are going to aim to achieve. Could you please talk about it? First of all, having said we are going to make a big change, we need to start from making a steady first step, and this first step should be providing better matching, leveraging current generative AI LLM, large language models technologies. We are going to improve the accuracy based on the existing technologies. Matching accuracy will be higher if we ask the user's needs under such a process. We will start from figuring out what is the best way to ask their needs and convert them into our proposals.
Once we achieve that, we should be able to have deeper conversation with the users, and we should be able to have better understanding on the users, including what makes them happier and what makes them having tough feeling. Accordingly, we will be able to make more individualized proposals. Our proposal or quality becomes high enough. Users will start feeling having a friendly relationship with us. AI-Agent will become equivalent to their real friends who are always there for them to think together and figure out better ways together. At the end of the day, all of these processes will be fully automated. AI-Agent will be there from the very beginning and always be there throughout the journey and keep living together. Thank you.
Once we have visibility on the roadmap, how it is going to keep evolving, it will be easier to have an image, and it will make us more exciting. As a result, the direction for the development will become very solid. That is the impression I have. Thinking about the future of our market, I am sure that especially white-collar workers are going to be affected in various ways. Most of our workers in DIP's market, they are getting involved with physical works, which should be hardly replaced by AI technologies. In addition, we know that lower birth rate and aging society will further develop in the future, meaning labor is going to be in short for sure in the future. Needless to say, our market becomes more active when labor is in short than when labor are excess.
In that sense, I believe there is a huge opportunity sitting right in front of us. Now we are living in an era when we can provide job matching to everyone, provide matching service which will let workers feel happiness. We should be able to provide value-added matching to everyone, including part-timers and fixed-term workers. Let's develop a matching service which will provide high value-added matching service leveraging AI technologies. Now the environment is in place where we can take on this challenge. We will be able to provide a solution to those job seekers who have not been able to come across with a good workplace. We will be able to provide support to those people we have been facing a labor shortage situation. This is the purpose why we are going to take on this challenge to develop AI-Agent.
Let's develop and provide a new solution based on the philosophy and leveraging existing technologies. I will believe that it will be able to make it happen. We will do it. We will create a new era of DIP with AI-Agent. Philosophy contest. Our employees shared their episodes materializing dream, idea.