Start the earnings briefing for the full- year financial results of FY 2025 ending March 2026. We will only be offering live streaming this time. We plan to have a session until 5:40 P.M. After that, we will have a Q&A session with institutional investors on a separate Zoom panel, 5:50 P.M. I'd like to introduce the presenters. Representative Director, President, and CEO, Kotaro Sawada.
Hello.
Director, Executive Vice President and CFO, Koji Yanagisawa.
Hello.
There will be two presenters today. First, CFO Yanagisawa will take us through the business results.
I'd like to walk you through the full-year financial results for FY 2025 ending March 2026. The presentation document we will use today has already been uploaded to our website's investor relations page, so please take a look. First, I'd like to walk you through the highlights of the full-year financial results of FY 2025. As for the full-year, GMV increased by 8.4% year-on-year to JPY 666 billion. GMV, including other GMV, increased by 12.4% year-on-year to JPY 646.1 billion.
Total GMV for the ZOZOTOWN business, LINE Yahoo! Commerce and B2B business combined increased by 5.1% year-over-year to JPY 659 billion. EBITDA increased by 10.2% year-on-year to JPY 76.9 billion. EBITDA margin was 7.9%, now 0.2 points from the same period last year. Progress against the revised company plan announced on July 31st is as follows: GMV, excluding other GMV, 98.3% and total GMV for the ZOZOTOWN business, LINE Yahoo!.
Commerce and B2B business all combined 100.1% and EBITDA 100.3%. Regarding GMV, strong performance during the winter sales in the fourth quarter enabled us to achieve growth that offset the shortfall from the headwind of the third quarter. The combined total for the ZOZOTOWN business, LINE Yahoo! Commerce and B2B business met target. This fell short of its target due to factors such as the slump in luxury industry and changes to the U.S. tariff system, resulting in the overall business failing to meet its target. EBITDA met its target primarily due to reductions in logistics-related expenses and shipping costs. Both GMV and EBITDA reached new all-time high. Let's now go to page seven of the handout. This is a quarterly trend in consolidated performance.
As I mentioned, for the fourth quarter accounting period, GMV, including other GMV, increased by 14.2% compared to the same period last year. For the same reason I mentioned, the ZOZOTOWN business saw strong customer traffic, particularly in January, and with ample inventory available for the sales period and sales growth, well, period grew. LINE Yahoo! Commerce also grew steadily, partly due to an increase in the number of days of Honki no Zozomatsuri. Moving on to the next page, this does not exist in the handout. As announced in today's press release, we have acquired all shares of HIGH LINK and made it a wholly owned subsidiary. Founded in 2017, HIGH LINK operates Coloria, a comprehensive fragrance platform, as its primary business under the mission of enhancing the world's fragrance.
By welcoming HIGH LINK, a company engaged in businesses centered on fragrances which have a highly high affinity with fashion into ZOZO Group, we expand out into a new area related to fashion. Regarding the details of the transactions, we have acquired all outstanding shares of HIGH LINK for JPY 4.95 billion entirely with our own capital. The company will be consolidated starting in May 2026, This acquisition is already reflected in our full-year consolidated earnings forecast for the full-year. That will be explained later. Let's now go to page 8 of the handout. We will analyze the changes in EBITDA compared to previous year's results at the end of fourth quarter.
EBITDA increased by approximately JPY 7.14 billion from JPY 69.78 billion in the previous year to JPY 76.92 billion in the current fiscal year. Factors attributable to the increase in EBITDA are as follows: Gross profit increased due to higher GMV in ZOZOTOWN business and LINE Yahoo! Commerce, JPY +9.36 billion. Sales increased due to growth in the present business, JPY +37 billion. Gross profit increased due to consolidation of certain other businesses, JPY 6.86 billion. Reduction in variable costs, JPY +290 million. This is driven by the containment of logistics-related personnel expenses resulting from the streamlining of logistics centers.
Factors that reduced EBITDA are as follows: Increase in fixed costs. Due to a rise in consolidated headcount associated with the consolidation of Lyst, the occurrence of one-time expenses related to M&A in the first quarter, minus JPY 3.15 billion, increase in actual PR expenses to attract customers and those sales and cover Lyst standalone expenses minus JPY 9.97 billion, and increase in other expenses due to success fees paid to SK related to M&A in the first quarter minus JPY 921 billion. Here are the cash flow trends. Cash flows from operating activities were driven by an increase in profit before income taxes as well as increasing in payments of corporate income taxes and others.
Cash flows from investing activities for the current period included expenditures associated with the acquisition of Lyst and the replacement of equipment at existing logistics centers and cash flows from financial activities included expenditures related to the acquisition of treasury stock. Next up, page 21, breakdown of SG&A. The SG&A as a ratio relative GMV was 22.2%, a decrease of one percentage point compared to the same period last year. While GMV expanded following the consolidation of Lyst, certain SG&A items did not occur or are minimal on a standalone for Lyst, contributed to the decline in the SG&A ratio. Factors that drove up the SG&A ratio are the following, as we have been explaining before. Amortization of goodwill related to the acquisition of Lyst. There was an increase in advertising expenses due to higher web ad advertising spending for ZOZOTOWN.
Factors contributing to the decrease in the SG&A ratio include the following: Lower shipping costs resulting from the increased economic terms with the delivery contractors starting October 2025, driven by both ex-credit consolidation efforts and delivery efficiency initiatives, -0.6 points. A decrease in logistics-related labor costs driven by improved operational efficiency, including inventory optimization in logistics centers and labor savings from automation initiatives, 0.5 points. A decrease in payment collection commission of 0.02 points. In addition, as we have achieved our full-year targets for operating profit and EBITDA, we have decided to pay an year-end bonus, and consequently, we have recorded a relevant expenses in the fourth quarter under payroll costs for employee logistics related expenses, as stated by me there. Let's go to page 24.
We show our after promotion related expenses here. These expenses include advertising costs and point related expenses that are deducted from sales, as we have explained before. In Q4, after promotion expenses amounted to 5.5% of GMV. The 0.7 percentage point increase in the ratio of after promotion expenses to GMV compared to the same period was due to the following factors. One, an increase in online advertising spending on ZOZOTOWN. Second, an increase in promotional expenses rose due to initiatives such as acquiring new members and reactivating dormant members. Third, the recognition of expenses on a standalone basis of Lyst. In particular, for the ZOZOTOWN business in Q4, we invested additional expenses on top of the remaining amounts from Q3 to achieve our GMV targets.
As a result, after promotion related expenses for the full-year amounted to 4.3% of the GMV, which is slightly higher than our initial plan that we announced at the start of the year. We expect the budget for the current fiscal year to remain at the same level as FY 2025 at 4.8% of GMV. Moving on to page 25 of the handout. The followings are the ZOZOTOWN KPIs. Please note that the following indicators do not include results from LINE Yahoo! Commerce, Lyst, or B2B businesses. The number of total buyers increased by 360,000 from the previous quarter to 13.17 million.
The number of active members increased by 308,000 from the previous quarter to 12.47 million, and the number of guest buyers decreased by 4,000 from the previous quarter to 609,000. In Q4, we continued to successfully acquire new members by increasing our web ad and friend referral campaigns year-over-year. In addition, re-engagement initiatives for dormant members have delivered positive results, with the impact of reactivation now becoming visible. During the fiscal year, new member acquisition remained strong in every quarter, resulting in a significant increase in the number of total buyers. This is page 28 of the handout. The number of shops on ZOZOTOWN.
At the end of the fourth quarter, the number of shops fitted 1,710, a net increase of two shops from the previous quarter. The number of new stores opened in the fourth quarter was 46, including stores like the outdoor brand Salomon, Sanrio house, a brand supervised by Sanrio and operated by Mash Style Lab, Takarajima Store, an apparel store operated by the publishing company, Takarajimasha, and more. Please note that in the fourth quarter, as we have explained before, there were relatively large number of store closures, particularly due to brand discontinuations. As a result, the total number of stores decreased compared to the previous quarter. Nevertheless, we successfully achieved our full-year target for new store openings for FY 2025, and we aim to maintain a similar pace of new store openings in the current full-year as well.
With respect to average retail price, which is on page 30, it came to JPY 3,974, a 1.6% year-on-year decrease. Price increases for new fall and winter merchandise have moderated, with prices now dropping in line with last year's levels. The average retail price fell due to a higher proportion of sale items compared to the period last year. As a result of this, our average order value stood at JPY 8,854, - 1.3% year-over-year. The number of items purchased per order rose, supported by an improved cross-selling ratio, which was driven by a higher markdown ratio. However, the decline in average retail price that I just talked about outweighed these effects, leading to lower average order value.
The volume of promotions offering free shipping on purchases of JPY 12,000 or more remain at the same level as the previous year, and the effect of this promotion on increasing the number of items purchased per order was limited. The volume promotions offering free shipping on purchase of JPY 12,000 or more was lower than the same period last year, but the campaigns were implemented effectively. The reduction in the frequency of these promotions did not result in a decrease in average purchase. Let's go to page 33. I will explain the changes of our key disclosure indicators starting from the next fiscal year, FY 2026.
From the perspective of presenting our group's underlying earnings power, we have adopted EBITDA as our management indicator that excludes the impact of amortization related to goodwill and other items arising from M&A. However, the group has consistently been making capital investments in logistics centers and allocates resources to the internal development of software, and the depreciation associated with these investments is recognized as an essential cost of our business operations. Accordingly, to more appropriately reflect our group's underlying earnings power, we have decided to adopt adjusted EBITDA. Under this metric, only amortization of goodwill and intangible assets arising from M&A, as well as acquisition-related costs will be adjusted, while all other depreciation and amortization expenses will be reflected. Starting from this current fiscal year, we are going to adopt EBITDA instead of EBITDA. Please bear that in mind.
I'd like to share the full-year consolidated earnings forecast for the current fiscal year, FY 2026. Total GMV is expected to increase by 2.0% year-over-year to JPY 679.6 billion. GMV, excluding other GMV, are expected to increase by 5.0% year-over-year to JPY 608.6 billion. Net sales is expected to increase by 5.9% year-on-year to JPY 241.9 billion. OP is expected to increase by 7.3% to JPY 74.4 billion, and the OP margin 11.0%. Adjusted EBITDA is expected to increase by 7.2% year-over-year to JPY 77.9 billion. Adjusted EBITDA margin is expected to be 11.5%.
Regarding dividends, we continue to target the payout ratio of 70% or higher and plan to pay a dividend of JPY 40 per share. Moving on to page 35. These are the targets by business segment for FY 2026. For ZOZOTOWN business, we will continue to aim for sustained growth by increasing the number of buyers, primarily through enhanced efforts to acquire new users and by raising ZOZOTOWN's share of fashion consumption. For Yahoo! Commerce, assuming that large-scale promotional campaigns such as Tenbai and those on Yahoo! Shopping are implemented at levels comparable to the previous year, we expect growth driven by new member acquisitions and increased contribution from existing buyers in prior years. For Lyst, we expect approximately 10% growth, mainly driven by an increase in the number of lists included in the consolidated platform state.
We view the current and next fiscal year as a critical investment phase for achieving future nonlinear growth, and we're focusing on building new business models that go beyond existing frameworks. We consolidated them in May, starting from FY 2026, we will be able to have the impact of this on the full-year basis. We expect to have a par level GMV growth as the previous fiscal year. Regarding ZOZO Ad, which accounts for the majority of our advertising business, our plan is based on conservative assumptions for key advertising related metrics. In addition, revenue from advertising new offerings other than ZOZO Ad is expected to decline, reflecting our plan to discontinue in advertising. As a result, we project a slight year-over-year increase in the overall advertising business. Go to page 42.
I'd like to share our logistics spaces expansion plan. Regarding DPL Tsukuba Chuo, which we began leasing in April 2024 and has been operational since August of that year. The lease area will be expanded starting in May 26th. We will begin leasing ZOZOBASE Narashino 3 starting in March 2027. Operations are scheduled to begin in August of 2027, with full-scale operations planned for October of 2027. Operation will take place in FY 2027. ZOZOBASE Narashino 3 is positioned as a facility that will transfer, revamp, and rebuild the functions of ZOZOBASE Narashino 1. As a facility designed to accommodate future growth in GMV, we will promote further automation to aim for a workforce reduction of approximately 60% compared to the existing spaces. Lastly, this page.
Sorry that I must ask you to go back several pages. This is page 11. This is the capital expenditures. Capital expenditures for FY 2025 were largely in line with our plan. For FY 2026, which is our current fiscal year, due to the cash outflow related to ZOZOBASE Narashino 3, Narashino 3, which is CapEx, which I explained earlier, we're planning capital expenditures of JPY 11.5 billion . Additionally, regarding goodwill amortization, as I explained, our plan is based on the assumption that it will begin to be recognized starting in May 2026. Amortization of goodwill related to HIGH LINK is expected to commence in May 2026.
Based on the assumption, it is projected at JPY 610 million for the current fiscal year and JPY 670 million for the following fiscal year, reflecting a full-year impact from the next fiscal year and the amortization period of the goodwill is planned to be seven years. This concludes my part of the presentation. Now I'd like to hand over to Sawada, our CEO.
Hello, everyone. Thank you for your patience. What I would like to do is to walk you through our medium-term business plan. Why are we talking about medium-term business plan now? Actually, we haven't had the opportunity to share our midterm business plan to external parties. When we think about the rapid changes of the external factors, which is inclusive of how people work in the era of AI and the services we provide, we need to think about how we fight in the world of the internet, and that must change going forward.
In order for us to have a healthy battle, our resources, money, people, and information, we're starting to gather all these valid information, and we needed to come up with a clear path going ahead. What I would like to do today is to share our medium-term business plan with you. Here is the agenda. Next slide, please. This is a really brief summary of our business plan. First of all, this is the period. This is a four-year plan. This is until FY 2029 ending March 2030.
In terms of our objective for our adjusted EBITDA, which Mr. Yanagisawa explained as our new indicator, we will aim for JPY 90 billion, and that is 123.8% over FY 2025. Just to give you the background of this, we operate this giant service called ZOZO, and we have been allocating a lot of our resources there. We know that this is not something that we can rely on 100% in the future. Of course, we're going to continue to grow our ZOZOTOWN, we also have to think of other services so that we can have incremental revenues. We are detecting internal and also external changes of the market and would like to seize our opportunity there.
By the way, our midterm business plan, sometimes or oftentimes, I believe that companies come up with a catchphrase or like a tagline, we thought of our tagline as well. We came up with a really simple headline of Chu-Kei, which is a really simple word. Chu being the sound of a mouth. You know, chu being the sound a mouth makes in Japan, and also the first part of the word medium term that represents our medium term business plan. We came up with this character of a mouth. This is our plan for the upcoming year. This is how we have grown so far. In the next four years, we'd like to grow to JPY 90 billion.
When you look at FY 2021, we achieved JPY 60 billion, and we are here in fiscal year 2025. This is where we want to get to by fiscal year ending March 2030. We identified three different domains that we'd like to focus on: Near Fashion, More Fashion, Global Domain. More Fashion, this is where our core business of ZOZOTOWN goes into and also WEAR as well. Basically please think of it as our core business. This alone we'd like to do JPY 80 billion. If you turn to the left bar, which is Near Fashion domain. This means peripheral domain of fashion. We'd like to do JPY 5 billion and with Global Domain, JPY 5 billion. Next slide, please. For each domain, how are we going to make progress?
Let's start with more fashion domain. This is our core driver of this growth. We want to have even more solid growth here. Next slide. Have different pieces of information here that I have already shared with you. What are the growth engines for our existing business? It is the new user acquisition. Our share is quite high, so do we still have potential to grow? That might be the question, but looking at the numbers, we do believe that there is more potential for us to grow. Last year, we conducted ZozoFest and then recently, I think it was in March, we did a pop-up store. We know that there are segments of new users that we have not yet engaged with.
What we would like to do is to really expand into offline touchpoints to reach to those customers. You know, because of these efforts that we've made so far, and we've been observing this for quite some time already. We conduct a survey to our consumers and we asked about their top of mind places to buy fashion. This is for men and women, 15 - 59. Sorry, no, women only 15 - 59. We asked what they would think of as a place to buy fashion products. We are in the leading position as you can see. Now I wanna talk about more fashion further, and I'm sure this is of your interest as well. I wanna talk about Musinsa.
We've been able to enjoy an increased number of brands on ZOZOTOWN. Now we handle 11,247 brands. There was a notable increase of a number of brands driven by Musinsa has been very proactive in incorporating us for the pop-up store. Musinsa is a large scale Korean fashion mall. We will continue to deepen our relationship with them as we engage in different activities. I wanna continue on to talk about more fashion domain. What is the impact of AI agents? For the next coming years, this is going to be our policy. Next slide, please. You can see here that people go through this very simple funnel until the purchase of fashion items. It's quite simple.
There's the need and interest, and then currently search engines play an important role there. The wave, the new wave of AI agents is called there as well now. What sort of impact would that have on e-commerce? I do believe that there will be an impact to e-commerce. We don't know yet which operator will be mainstream, but what we would like to do is to work with them so that we can utilize them as our touch point. At the same time, AI agents, I believe, are very good at answering generally, and I'm sure many of you use this already, and you can understand what I'm talking about. If it's something very specific as a genre, the answers that you may get from these AI agents may not always be correct. That is what is happening around the world.
We don't think that it will be able to advance that feature. We have abundant amount of data in fashion, we run a fashion e-commerce mall, and that is what has made us strong and characteristic. We believe that our AI agent, which is fashion-specific, will also be balanced. What we'd like to do is to develop our fashion-specific AI agent to cater to more specific needs. Pressly has been announced already. ChatGPT is a leading company of AI agents. We're already working with ChatGPT app to propose WEAR styling or WEAR outfits. Just the other day, finally, this was our long-awaited aspiration.
We were able to use LINE, and we were able to release a LINE official account that supports users to decide their outfits through conversational AI. I hope that you use this so that you can feel firsthand what we aim to do in this world, in this world of AI. Our data is very original, and we've been developing data to train AI. We are using this data to come up with different features on WEAR, and it's been advancing quite well. We've been using this to the fullest. The next month user revisit rate has gone up to 1.1 x already. We believe that the revisit rate could go up even higher as we utilize data this way.
We are rolling out to different channels. We want to bring this on board to ZOZOTOWN in the future. We cannot give you a timeline for it, but please understand this is what we aim to do in the future. These are some of the initiatives that we'd like to implement so that we can enhance our core fashion domain. Let's go to Near Fashion domain next. Next slide, please. What is the concept of Near Fashion? What exactly is that domain? ZOZOTOWN users also buy different categories of things. We want to start proposing to those people different areas of merchandise. We wanna branch out into other fashion areas outside of ZOZOTOWN. What do we mean by that exactly? These are examples of quote-unquote Near Fashion domains that may resonate with ZOZOTOWN users.
Hair salons make up for about JPY 2 trillion market size. Fitness and gym, that's JPY 700 billion. Tooth whitening, which is really trending right now, is JPY 45 billion. We call it, you know, internally as ways to quote-unquote, "polish yourself." It's a specific itself. We're not trying to sell them on e-beauty. We could also consider offering physical services. We're not just sticking to the idea of selling this online on our e-commerce platform. These are some of the new services that we consider to go through. I just wanted to give you more color on this. We're thinking of two levers for expansion. HIGH LINK is an example of the left one. This is actually a first example of the left one.
This is partnerships, M&A. Maybe it doesn't go that far as M&A. It can be, you know, us having partnerships or capital alliances with different companies. There's another lever, which is to create something in-house from scratch. This is another approach we'd like to take in order to expand into Near Fashion domain. For HIGH LINK, let me turn to the next slide. As Yanagisawa mentioned, we acquired HIGH LINK as a wholly owned subsidiary. They have, they've been operating a fragrance platform, Coloria, and then they offer a subscription model. For the interest of time, I won't go into details with this, but it's very close to fashion in terms of this area, right? What we'd like to do is to, you know, I wanna talk about ZOZOFIT.
We surpassed 1 billion downloads. Actually, last year this grew significantly, and we do believe that this has a big potential. This past, this quite a nice and the market has been accepting this quite well. By the way, the total download, the total number of downloads of WEAR is about JPY 12 million. Compared to that, it is still small, but we believe that, you know, it's a great achievement, how we were able to surpass the 1 million downloads. Let's talk about Lyst. There are many things that we need to do, but in the long term, what are we aiming for for Lyst? I wanted to share that with you. I just mentioned that we're going to make our own AI agent as a category healer. We're going to operate this AI agent.
We are also aimed to create a similar funnel using Lyst. The know-how and the data expertise that we have to create that sort of a fashion-specific AI agent, we believe that we can transplant that to Lyst as well. That was a brief explanation of our medium-term plan business plan. Lastly, this is outside of the medium-term business plan, but I wanted to share something with you. This is about internal use of AI. It is progressing quite steadily internally. We have adopted ZOZO's own AI utilization metrics. We have already set up an objective for this, as you can see. You can take a look at it later. Level three, we believe, is going to have a business impact or valid business impact.
We want to first get to level three and then ultimately to level four. Next, this is about responding to geopolitical risks. I'm sure you're quite interested in this topic. The impact of this is, as of today, still limited. Regarding items supplied by brands, we haven't seen a significant increase in prices yet. We may start to see impact sometime in fall, but so far we haven't seen a significant increase in prices. For indirect materials like packaging and cardboard, some cost impact is expected, but impact on FY 2024 is expected to remain limited. We are doing a lot of analysis. Of course, the chances of us having negative impact is greater than having no impact, but still it remains, we expect this to remain limited. Lastly, this is about SDGs.
We are looking at different external assessment methods, and so far we've been well received by multiple external assessors. We want to really define and identify which metrics that we're going to focus on as we make progress in this field. This brings us to the end of the earnings briefing. Thank you for your participation.