[Translator]Time to start the full year financial results briefing of ZOZO for FY '22, ending in March 2023. We will be offering live streaming. We plan to have a session until 5:35 P.M. After that, on a separate Zoom channel, we will have a Q&A session with institutional investors from 5:50 P.M. I'd like to introduce the participants. Representative Director, President, and CEO, Kotaro Sawada. Hello . Director, Executive Vice President & CFO, Koji Yanagisawa. Hello . The briefing will be offered by the two presenters. CFO Yanagisawa will take us through the business results.
[Translator]I'm going to take off my sunglasses and change to regular glasses. I'd like to walk you through the full year earnings results for FY '22 ending March of 2023.
[Translator] By the way, the presentation document we will be using today has already been uploaded to the IR page of our website. Please take a look. Let's jump right in. Here are the highlights of this quarter. Excuse me. As for FY '23 full year, our gross merchandise value, GMV, went up 7.0% year-on-year, landing at JPY 544.3 billion. GMV, excluding other GMV, went up 8.4% year-on-year, landing at JPY 501.1 billion. Operating profit was up by 13.6%, landing at JPY 56.4 billion. Operating profit margin, OPM, was 11.3%, improving by 0.6 point year-on-year. Both GMV and operating profit exceeded the revised company plan, achieving extremely favorable results. Both GMV and operating profit reached record highs.
The achievement rate against the revised plan for GMV, excluding other GMV, was 101.1%, and 102.6% for operating profit. Let's go to page 7. These are the quarterly trend of the consolidated business results in the fourth quarter. GMV, excluding other GMV, was up by 7.0% year-on-year. It grew by 9.5%, ZOZOTOWN and Yahoo! Shopping combined. As for OP, although expenses for attracting customers and sales promotion increased compared to the same period of the previous year, thanks to the gross profit increase coming from the GMV growth and some cost reductions, mainly variable costs, OP increased by 8.4% year-on-year. OPM turned out to be 9.1%. Next, I would like to share the details of our business results. This is page 8 of the deck.
Let's look at the increase/decrease analysis of the operating profit. OP was JPY 49.65 billion in FY '22. In FY '23, it amounted to JPY 56.42 billion, up by approximately JPY 6.77 billion. Factors attributable to the growth of the OP were, first, a JPY 13.11 billion from the increase of consignment commission from the GMV growth. JPY 1.47 billion from the sales increase generated by the advertising business. JPY 2.8 billion from the growth of shipping revenue and payment service revenue from the GMV growth. Factors that drove down the OP were. Actually, there are four factors. First, JPY 2.43 billion from the increase in costs impacted by the increased number of employees, logistic bases, and outsourcing expenses, so that's -JPY 2.43 billion.
Minus JPY 1.8 billion from the increase in variable costs that rose in related GMV. Minus JPY 4.65 billion from the increase of the actual promotion related expenses associated mainly with expenses to attract customers and point related expenses. Minus JPY 1.68 billion from other expenses such as the one-off expenses incurred in connection with the increased number of logistic bases in the first and the fourth quarter, and the increase in telecom expenses due to the rise in cloud server usage. Here are the cash flow trends. Cash flow from investing activities was used for the expansion of the logistic bases this year. There are no other major items. Let's go to page 16. This is the quarterly GMV trend.
As we explained before, in the B2B business, a brand that used to make a large contribution to our GMV left our B2B business in the fourth quarter of the previous fiscal year. Therefore, the ratio of B2B business against GMV decreased by 1.9 points year-on-year to 2.8%. On the other hand, our consignment sales, which comprises the majority of the overall GMV, has been trending very well. The component ratio grew by 0.8 points, becoming 76.7% of GMV. Next, there is the breakdown of SG&A on a full year basis. The SG&A to GMV ratio was 22.9%, down 0.1 point from the same period of the previous year. Factors that drove down the SG&A ratio are as follows.
One, the operating efficiency of the logistic base is improved, resulting in a 0.3-point decline of logistics related expenses under payroll and staff costs. Number two, resizing of an optimization of the sizes of the cardboard boxes used for delivery and cost reductions resulting from higher order value surpassed the cost pressure coming from a fuel surcharge. This resulted in a 0.3-point reduction of the shipping cost. On the other hand, factors attributed to drive up the SG&A were: increase in customer acquisition costs, meaning for TV commercial and web ads, resulting in a 0.4-point increase in advertising expenses. Second, others increased by 0.2 point due to an increase in cloud services for system replenishment and service enhancement, as well as equipment purchases associated with the increase in logistics centers in the first quarter and the fourth quarter.
This is page 4 of the deck. This is a breakdown of SG&A expenses by quarter. The ratio of SG&A to GMV was to 24.7%, up 0.9 point for the same period of the previous year. From before the third quarter, rising order value has kept shipping costs to GMV ratio lower than the level it was in the same period last year. Also, the ratio of payroll costs for employees under payroll costs to GMV rose 0 points due to the provision for bonus, and we actively aired more TV commercials and web ads, which resulted in a 0.7-point increase in advertising expenses. These are the main factors that drove up and down the SG&A ratio. Next, I'm going back a little bit here to page 23. Here's the actual promotion-related expenses trend.
In the fourth quarter, as I have explained earlier, our actual promotion-related expenses, which is a sum of advertising expenses and point-related expenses, turned out to be 5.0% of GMV. Our business performance was trending positively, we actively implemented ads such as TV commercials and web ads to attract customers. Moving on to page 21. Here are the trends in operating profit and OPM. As I have mentioned, there was an increase in the provision for bonus to our employees and promotion expenses in the fourth quarter. Gross profit increased in conjunction with GMV growth, and we saw certain cost reductions, mainly in the variable costs. For these reasons, our operating profit margin exceeded the one of the same period last year by 0.1 point, landing at 9.1%. Let's go to page 25.
Moving on to the main KPIs of ZOZOTOWN. By the way, the KPIs hereafter do not include the results of our Yahoo! Shopping or B2B business. This is only for the main ZOZOTOWN. The number of total buyers was up by 200,000 from the previous quarter, amounting to 11.41 million, of which active members was 10.19 million, increasing by 260,000 against the previous quarter, exceeding 10 million for the first time. Guest buyers decreased by 60,000, finishing at 1.21 million. As for the increase of the active members, we managed to retain the newly recruited members from last year. Active TV commercial airing and web ad implementation during the main winter sale and the cosmetic campaign period worked to attract customers. These are the factors.
Let's go to page 26. This is the number of shops in ZOZOTOWN. As of the end of the fourth quarter, the number of shops was 1,562, a net increase of 8 shops from the end of the previous quarter. We welcomed 31 new shops to our platform this quarter. To name a few, we now have a fast fashion brand from the U.S. that has relaunched in Japan, Forever 21, and a brand from a major catalog mail order company, Nissen. The brand name is Nissen. A well-known all-in-one beauty essential developed by Shin Nihon Seiyaku, PERFECT ONE. Moving on to page 31. With respect to the average retail price, it was JPY 3,987, up by 6.3% year-on-year.
The increase is attributed to the price increases of certain products and decreases in the discount rate of products sold during the sales period. These factors push up the retail prices of merchandise sold both at original prices and discounted prices. Moving on to page 32, average order value. The average order value turned out to be JPY 8,300, up 4.1% year-on-year. Although the number of items per shipment continued to decrease, the impact of the retail price increases was greater. This led to a higher average order value compared to the same period of the previous year. Now I'd like to share the company's plan for the FY '23 ending in March 2024, which is the ongoing period. This is page 34 of the handout. Here are the full year consolidated earnings forecasts and dividends for the ongoing fiscal year.
GMV +6.7% from the previous year, JPY 580.8 billion. GMV excluding other GMV, +6.8%, JPY 535.2 billion. Net sales, +9.4% from the previous year, JPY 207 billion. Operating profit, +6.3%, JPY 60 billion. Operating profit margin projected to be 11.2% or higher. This is our earnings forecast, and we will continue to target a dividend payout ratio of 50% or more. Therefore, the dividend per share is expected to be 71 JPY. Let's go to page 35. These are the targets by business for the current fiscal period. For the ZOZOTOWN business, we aim to achieve successive growth by continuing to implement measures to attract customers.
The 21.7% year-on-year decline in outright purchase, production, and sales within the ZOZOTOWN business takes into account the reaction of the large contribution to sales of the products coming from the collaboration product, coming from the collaboration project with celebrities that was implemented in the previous fiscal year. As for Yahoo Shopping ZOZOTOWN, it is expected to remain flat due to the impact of the changes in the holding sales promotion policy. As for the B2B business, we expect a certain level of growth of the clients we support. We also expect a slightly negative growth because support for the two sites that generated medium-sized sales last year was terminated. We'd like to go back a little bit to page 11. This is our capital investment trend. We plan to make capital investment totaling JPY 8 billion in the ongoing fiscal year.
The breakdown is as follows: JPY 6 billion for the new logistics center will start operation in August 2004. JPY 1.2 billion for existing logistics centers and offices, and JPY 0.8 billion for sustained investments. That'll be all from my side. Next, Mr. Sawada, Representative Director, will appear. Hello, everyone. Sawada. As Yanagisawa explained, last year, our GMV, excluding other GMV, we were able to reach JPY 500 billion. For the active users, excluding guest users, guest buyers, we've been able to exceed 10 million for the first time ever. We have been making the announcement that that was our target. We've been able to achieve that target this year. Now that the COVID is settling down, the stores are opening and the prices are hiking up.
We'd like to explain our management plans and the future outlook in this business environment. First of all, how do we see the market? What is the market overview? We used different public data sources, and we also used our original survey data to come up with these numbers. At the moment, for the fashion retail market, we calculate that market size to be JPY 10.8 trillion. Our target market is JPY 7.5 trillion. This graph shows on the vertical line the population of Japan and our share in fashion. This is the breakdown of JPY 7.5 trillion that we calculate ZOZO's target population to be 64 million. Later teens to 40s has been set as our target segment, but nowadays, people in their 50s started to shop from us, from Yahoo Shopping.
We believe that we can set our target to be from late teens to people in their fifties. That means we calculate our target population to be 64 million. Our BC penetration is about 28%. We've been able to achieve JPY 500 billion already. The number of ZOZO active members amounts to 11 million. Not only are we focused on the active members of ZOZO, we're also including members of Yahoo! Shopping ZOZOTOWN as well when we look at our market size. The number of active members, if they purchase 5 times fashion, then one of the purchase of the 5 purchases could be from ZOZO. That's done in terms of how frequent they're buying from us. Going forward, how do we plan to expand this?
Vertically, as I have mentioned, we're seeing more people in the city showing interest toward us, and also people in their teens showing more interest toward us. What we'd like to do is to broaden our user base. I'd like to talk more about this in detail later. That's how we see the vertical line. For the horizontal line, BC is very convenient, and I'd like to let people experience that. We want people to buy from us one out of four times that they buy fashion. Actually, we're already forecasting JPY 800 billion size of GMV. That was about the domestic market size that we forecast and the potential that we have in this market. That's number one and number two.
What we'd like to do is to attract a broader range of customers going forward and also improve the frequency of purchase per customer. There are other things we'd like to do. Number 3, purchase support that we started last year. At ZOZO or Yahoo! Shopping, depending on the sales that we generate, we hope that this purchase support is incremental sales. Number 4 is the expansion of cosmetics. We've been working on this for the past 2 years. This is the research data from Yano Keizai, which is a third party organization. The e-penetration of the cosmetics category is not that high, so we see an ample room for growth there. We also want to seize other ways to generate more. Last year, around autumn, we made the announcement of this.
We also want to continue to aim to monetize our technology. When it comes to Yahoo! Shopping buyers as well, you can see that we've been able to grow consecutively, and we believe that there's still more room for us to grow here. Especially, we've been able to acquire new members steadily in the past few years. As Yano Keizai mentioned, we've been able to successfully retain them the following years as well. By the way, for last year, we've been able to acquire record high number of new members. This is another angle to look at how we aim to attract a broader range of customers. You can see who exactly have become our active members already and how much potential we still have. You see orange and pale orange.
These are people who stopped buying, although they have experience buying from us. There are people who are interested in our service that are willing to use ZOZO. There are people that know of ZOZOTOWN, but that are not interested. That's the breakdown here. When you look at the chart, you see active members indicated in red. We believe that there's just as many potential customers. What we'd like to do is to expand our recognition to decrease the number of people who fall under others. We believe that there's still an ample room for us to grow by acquiring these customers. We also talked about raising the purchase frequency. How do we exactly aim to go about doing this? Before the sell, there is this step called communication.
This is what we are focusing on right now. There is now Lab. I'm not gonna go into detail of that, but there's also now TV, and there's also WEAR. What we'd like to do is combine them in a powerful way so that we offer solutions to find the user's own style. Rather than just to sell, we help them discover their own style and sell. We'd like to offer them more solutions so that we catch them at the upper part of the funnel. Indicated in yellow are measures that we are implementing right now. Physical stores. We have more physical stores than the EC sales in the market. Rather than just to focus on EC, we'd like to find ways to monetize the physical stores as well and expand it.
In blue you have Promotions that, which is our forte. What we'd like to do is to further hone them by using AI. That policy remains unchanged. We want to further enhance that policy. By combining all of these, we'd like to increase the touchpoints with our users to increase our GMV. Next is about the production support. To support the products that we sell on our platform, why don't we start producing them as well? That was the initial idea, this is the result from last year. Number of production types, 461. Number of pieces produced, 120,000. These are the number of items that we produced and sold on our platform.
This is the number of pieces that we produced, and that equals to the number of pieces that we sold. Last year, we kicked off Made by ZOZO, and this has been well-received by our clients. The benefit of this is that you can get more sales per type compared to regular production. We produce once we receive the order, so there's no inventory risk. There's elimination of the gap between sales period and the actual demand period. Hopefully, this Made by ZOZO service was utilized by SHIPS, and SHIPS decided to launch an exclusive brand for Made by ZOZO. This is now available. When it comes to the profit, the profit is still small.
What we'd like to do is to aim to generate a profit in the billion JPY range as early as possible. Let's go to cosmetics. For cosmetics, as we have mentioned in the beginning of the fiscal year, we said that we're going to aim for JPY 10 billion. Sorry, JPY 100 billion. Correction, JPY 10 billion. We didn't actually reach that level. Our GMV turned out to be JPY 9.1 billion. What we'd like to do is to apply the category development expertise we have gained from our operations that we gained from apparel business. I believe that there are more steps that we can take. What we'd like to do is to further enhance our cosmetic category.
We did achieve the GMV of JPY 9.1 billion, which is a little bit shy of JPY 10 billion. As a matter of fact, we are already one of the largest cosmetic EC players. We don't just want to be one of the largest cosmetic EC players, we want to be the largest in the near future. For other categories, aside from cosmetics, we're always exploring what other categories we can go into. Hopefully we'll be able to make an announcement of the new categories that we might be able to enter. Number 5 is the monetization of technology. ZOZOFIT. I won't go into details about the service, but just to give you the results, we started this from September last year, and we've been able to sell the number of pieces accumulatively.
The pieces sold amounts to about 8,300 pieces. We let the users wear that suit to measure themselves. We started this in the United States. We are going through different trial and error, and we are discovering new interesting things. We really want to use this as our pillar so that we can turn body measurement into an actual business. We want to start generating a profit in the JPY billion range as early as possible for this one as well. This is the summary of the future management plan. ZOZOTOWN and Yahoo! Shopping ZOZOTOWN, we will continue to expand customer base and contact frequency. I always say this to internal people and outside as well. We want ZOZO to be a place for fashion.
We also want to be an infrastructure for fashion. Becoming a place for fashion, this is from the consumer's point of view, and then becoming an infrastructure for fashion is the industry's point of view. What we'd like to do is to capture new customers and have a bigger customer base, and promote horizontal category development by leveraging customer base, and also promote new market development by leveraging technologies. That will be all for this part. It's been a while since we last talked about sustainability, so I wanted to go into that topic as well. Two years ago, we started to address this in a full-fledged manner. Two years ago, we came up with our sustainability statement. That sustainability statement is fashion connects and leads us to a sustainable future.
As a platform, of course, we need to take an active role, but also at the same time involve other players in the industry to move sustainability forward. We wanted to take it down a notch and decide what exactly we should do. We did that two years ago, and we decided on these four actions, and I wanted to share with you where we stand on these four. First of all, in Zalando, is highlight sustainable fashion choices to improve user experience. We created a page. On that page, we introduced sustainable fashion brands and the passion that goes behind these brands. This is very popular among these brands as well, our initiative, so we want to continue to do that. Another one is to create a made to order platform for zero waste.
We talked about Made by ZOZO. Once again, we produce. Once we receive the order, it's made to order, so there's no excess inventory. Promotion of that into business and at the same time, it also connects to positive impact in terms of sustainability as well. Promote diversity, equity and inclusion among everyone involved in fashion is the blue one. During the Pride Month, we change our site. We engage in those activities, and we also promote women. I believe that we're not doing enough of that, so that's our goal. We really want to focus on promoting women within our organization. The last one is to contribute to sustainable community development. Mainly in Chiba, we are contributing to the community. Our employees do places like elementary and junior high schools in Chiba.
90% of our energy is renewable too. Our corporate site has more and more information like this. We do have a comprehensive report. Please take a look at that report. Yesterday, we launched a new movie to showcase our initiatives in sustainability. We're very serious about thinking of what we can do as partner in the fashion industry. I hope that you understand that we're making very steady progress on all fronts. That is all from my side. Lastly, I'd like to introduce the cast. Thank you very much for watching and enjoying the drama series for one year. I'd like to introduce the hero and heroine of the drama. Hello. I'm Arryo, who played Daisuke. Thanks for watching the financial drama series partner.
This drama was produced by ZOZO employees, and I was once again touched by ZOZO's do, your mentality and how high the quality turned out to be. I personally like the music composed by our employees for this drama. It definitely suited the tonality of this drama. Turned out to be such a great piece of music. I like it. This is live-streamed on YouTube, so please check it out. I hope you also listen to it while watching the drama. Hello, I'm Erika Karata. I played the role of Hina. Thank you for watching the drama. I've never had a type of shooting like this, and it was a great experience for me. It was innovative how we came up with this idea of producing a financial results document that's fun to read and watch.
It feels like, and I truly enjoyed filming it. The drama came to a finale, and I'm already excited to learn more about the next financial results report. That will bring us to the end of the full year financial results briefing of ZOZO for FY '22 ending in March 2023. Thank you for watching.