Hello to everyone watching. I'm Tange, President and CEO of SHIFT. Thank you very much for taking time to join us for the livestream of our financial results briefing for the second quarter of the fiscal year ending August 2025. In today's comprehensive briefing, Director Kobayashi will first thoroughly explain the second quarter results in detail. After that, I, Tange, will discuss our strategic initiatives aimed at achieving further high growth in the second quarter of FY 2025, as well as our efforts toward SHIFT 3000 in the upcoming discussion. Following that, we will move on to the Q&A session. If you have any questions at any time during our session, please enter your name and join in the chat to submit your question. Also, we kindly ask that you submit your questions before our presentation is finished. Now then, we will begin with the explanation.
I'll explain the details of the financial results announcement. First, the summary. This year, we have made solid improvements in areas that saw declines last year, such as the drop in utilization rate and the decrease in sales efficiency. With a focus on continuing to improve operations like these, we have been working toward further growth. Regarding the first half of the fiscal year, as shown here, we achieved a high level of net profit, made efforts toward growth, and began to see improvements driven by AI. I would like to explain these points in more detail. First, let's look at the consolidated profit and loss statement. As you can see, in Q2, we achieved a very high gross profit margin of 35.5%. This is due, as will be explained later, to improvements in utilization rates and an increase in engineer unit prices.
As a result, the operating profit margin also improved to 14.4%, which had a positive impact on the results for the first half of the fiscal year. Operating profit increased by 72.1% compared to the same period last year. We've made very strong progress. Also, regarding the gross profit margin, we achieved 34.4%, which significantly exceeded our target of 33.5%. This shows the cumulative progress. As for sales, even when compared to past cumulative figures, we're showing solid progress. On the other hand, regarding operating profit, we've achieved a progress rate of 59.7% against our target of JPY 13.5 billion, which is quite high. While we plan to continue hiring in the second half, even with these planned investments, we expect to exceed the JPY 13.5 billion target. Next, let's look at the trend in gross profit margin. As you can see, we achieved a record high of 35.5%.
Regarding the utilization rate that made this possible, if we look at Q2 as a whole, even in February, it increased by 1.4%. Furthermore, even during the off-season in April, the utilization rate is expected to continue progressing steadily. This is a four percentage point increase from last year. We believe this will keep our utilization rate sufficient for the second half. Operational improvements are progressing steadily. Let's move on to the monthly customer unit price. We ourselves have been implementing strategies to increase the unit price of sales to our customers. Since last year, we've been taking action on this front, and we're seeing a continued upward trend in the blue standalone portion. On the other hand, regarding our loyal customers, the unit price appears to have temporarily declined. This is because starting this fiscal year, from Q2 onward, 33 new companies have newly joined as our loyal customers.
As a result, there has been a temporary drop in unit price, but if we count excluding the 33 new companies, the unit price has actually increased. We've been able to successfully raise the customer unit price. One of the factors contributing to this is the project unit price, which will be discussed next. As for the current project unit price, it has remained flat for the time being right now. We are thoroughly engaged in proposal activities and are preparing to make large-scale proposals for the future. As these come to fruition, we aim to raise the project unit price. This is one of our key focus areas for 2025. Next, let's talk about engineer unit prices. Regarding engineer unit prices, we've seen significant growth driven by improvements in utilization rates and an increased proportion of sales from high-value services.
The engineer unit price has risen significantly, reaching JPY 1.06 million. As for the number of engineers, due to controlled hiring in relation to utilization rates, the number of engineers has not increased substantially. We are working to supplement hiring effectively by utilizing business partners. In this way, we are moving forward with increasing the number of engineers. As for the second half of the fiscal year, we plan to accelerate hiring and aim to firmly get on a growth trend by increasing the unit price per engineer. Next, we will look at the performance by segment. As you can see, the gross profit margin has increased across all three segments: testing-related, development-related, and other adjacent services. In addition, for development-related services, the ratio of end users stands at 36.3%. It has improved by 4.8 percentage points.
This improvement is the result of our entire group steadily working on increasing utilization rates and unit prices. As a result, the gross profit margin has improved. We will continue these efforts and aim to further improve the gross profit margin heading into the next fiscal year. Next, let's move on to SG&A expenses. In the previous fiscal year, we managed to control our recruitment activities, which led to a decrease in recruitment costs. It stands at 2.5 percentage points. Looking ahead to the second half of the year, we plan to see this as an investment and increase recruitment spending in order to boost the number of hires. On the other hand, regarding personnel expenses, we believe that the ratio to sales will not necessarily increase in tandem, and we can keep it under control.
In this way, while managing overall SG&A expenses, we aim to make investments that support sustainable growth. This is the consolidated balance sheet. As we announced this time, we believe that large-scale investments will continue to be carried out going forward. To ensure we have sufficient investment capacity for that, we are consolidating funds across the entire group and minimizing external borrowing. Since interest rates are currently rising, we believe it is crucial to properly manage external borrowing, and we will continue to focus on this moving forward. We intend to continue operating in a way that ensures we maintain sufficient investment capacity. From here, we'd like to have Tange present on our actions toward high growth.
All right then. Since 2024, we have been working on various initiatives aimed at improving operations, so I would like to provide a progress report on those efforts. The key points are the short-term policies aimed at improving performance, as well as various initiatives toward achieving SHIFT 3000 target, which we have been working on over the past six months. All right, first, let's talk about sales. We've been aiming to take a top-down approach, and with that in mind, we've been proactively reaching out to various customers to become a prime partner whenever possible. To support this, we've also made some organizational changes. Currently, we're still working as a top vendor, collaborating with various companies and system integrators, building trust on site in different projects. Through this, we're aiming to gradually rise to the position of a prime partner. That's the kind of approach we're thinking of taking.
As you can see here, the monthly project unit prices have also been increasing significantly, especially in our transactions with system integrators, which are top vendors. Through this kind of approach, we're aiming to gradually grow our business. In addition to that, while we're pursuing a top-down sales strategy, we've also been successful in generating leads at the CXO level. We've secured 1,558 executive-level leads. In that regard as well, our sales efforts are progressing smoothly. Continuing with sales, we're working hard and diligently on expanding our customer base horizontally and increasing the volume of our proposal activities in various ways. Thanks to those efforts, I believe that from the end of 2024 into the first and second quarters of 2025, we've been able to steadily and effectively expand within our existing customers, reaching out to other departments as well and comprehensively.
In addition to that, we place a great deal of importance on customer retention rates. The retention rate has improved by about 6.8 percentage points. I believe this shows that our efforts are really producing results. Also, the utilization rate of our projects has an impact as well, and the buildup of our future pipeline is progressing smoothly, so I believe we've established a very solid and effective sales structure. Next, I'd like to talk about our efforts to improve performance. This involves the captain system that we've been implementing since last year, where we utilize on-site personnel to directly approach customers and secure project opportunities. Currently, the number of members designated as captains has grown significantly to 1,478. This initiative has been ongoing for some time now, and it's been very effective. In fact, just in February alone, it generated about JPY 1.4 billion in sales.
If we annualize that, it comes out to roughly JPY 10 billion. Since these results are being driven by the captains, I believe the initiative is progressing very well and delivering strong performance. Next, we'll move on to the industry-based divisional structure. This is based on the traditional matrix organization model. Vertically, we have business divisions, and horizontally, we have services. It is structured as a matrix. However, it has been gradually evolving over time. Starting from the first quarter of this year, we've established a trinity structure centered around the heads of each business division, bringing together the division head, sales, and delivery. For each of these roles, we've clearly defined their missions. For example, what KPIs should a division head be accountable for? For a head of delivery, what KPIs they should be focusing on?
For the Head of Sales as well, we've made it very clear what key performance indicators and expectations they should be focusing on, and we've updated our operations to ensure close communication and transparency. I now receive weekly reports from each division head and department head, which has allowed us to operate with a much higher level of clarity and precision. As a result of these efforts, there have been various initiatives, but I believe we achieved very good results in the first half of the year. Our gross profit significantly improved. Above all, this was due to an increase in utilization rate. To achieve this, we consolidated dedicated assignment teams across departments. Each business division aligned their efforts around the KPI of utilization rate, and we've been communicating in a unified language to work toward that common goal.
We set detailed skill tags for each engineer in order to avoid assignment mismatches and to ensure that assignments are highly well-matched. As a result, the matching rate reached 98.3%, which indeed, I believe, is an absolutely, truly excellent outcome. I think these kinds of initiatives have paid off, leading to the highest-ever gross profit and operating rate. Next, let's talk about recruitment. Regarding recruitment, SHIFT is known for hiring a large number of members, but we also believe that the quality of hires is important. Up until now, we had been focusing on quantity, but since we've reached a point where we can secure enough volume, we're now shifting our focus to quality. We've also been working on hiring key project members for upstream processes, recognizing their importance.
As for the hiring plan itself, out of a total of a little over 2,000 people, about 1,400 have already been confirmed for hire. In terms of progress, we've already passed the halfway point of the fiscal year, and the progress rate has exceeded 50%, reaching around 70%. Also, in terms of the quality of hires, we're focusing on high-level positions. Compared to the last year, the proportion of the high-level tier was about 22.6%. It's reached 38.3%, which is quite significant. I believe we can say that we're successfully hiring highly qualified individuals in a steady manner. Moving on, this is about new graduate recruitment. We have 380 new graduates scheduled to join the group as of 2025. What we'd like to highlight is that in this industry, the ratio of women is quite low, around 20%. We are aiming to bring change starting with new graduates.
We've managed to exceed the 20% mark, and currently, women make up 38% of our new hires, which we believe is a strong point we can proudly promote. Additionally, the fact that we're now able to recruit new graduates across the entire group shows that, as a recruitment group, our capabilities are in a very good place. Also, in this system integrator industry, which has over a million people, only a few tens of thousands of new graduates actually join, so it's an industry that doesn't see much net growth. What I want to convey is that by increasing our share among these new graduates, I believe we can secure a larger portion of the highly promising engineers in this industry. Looking toward the future, even though we currently have 380 people, we want to focus on hiring new graduates, which we haven't been able to do sufficiently.
We are moving forward with the goal of hiring 1,000 people annually and taking a leadership position in the industry. We believe we're making very good progress on this front as well, and that things are going smoothly. Now, moving on, I'd like to report on the evolution of our services as we work toward SHIFT 3000. First of all, regarding SHIFT 3000, our founding business, Testing Services, has, I strongly believe, grown into a company that truly and effectively represents the industry. Looking back, I think there have been several key steps in building that service. I believe there are roughly four major steps. The first is creating the seed of the business. This is the step where we develop the service. Next, once that seed starts to sprout, we move to scale it up. In terms of testing, this meant working on TCOE initiatives.
We moved on to structuring that into a framework, aiming to become a leading company in the industry. We worked on systematizing it so that it becomes a common language across the board. Finally, as both revenue and profit grow, we're able to gain market share. We believe that this could potentially put us among the top players in the industry. We've been effectively implementing this approach in our software testing business, and now we're working to expand it into other services and sectors as well. As you may know, in terms of development, we've been hiring engineers through M&A, and we believe we're now starting to scale up from simply receiving development orders to handling larger-scale projects. Now we're at a point where we're able to handle projects that exceed JPY 10 billion each. I believe we're currently at what you might call step two.
At the same time, services like PMO, ERP, and agile organizations are already starting to show promise as businesses for us. We are now working on incorporating large-scale projects into these areas. What we especially want to emphasize and bring to your attention this time is shown here in red: our consulting business, our security business, and our BPO business, including Washer and I, that we are proud of. As you can see, we believe these areas have entered a very exciting phase. First, let's talk about the consulting business in more comprehensive detail. As I've often reported before, here, we've outlined the differences between major consulting firms and SHIFT's consulting team. As you may know, major consulting firms handle everything from business planning and IT planning to requirements definition, covering the upperstream processes.
On the other hand, major system integrators, especially those affiliated with manufacturers, typically handle the lowerstream processes, starting from requirements definition. As for us, we aim to cover all areas from upstream to downstream comprehensively. Within that, our consulting team plays a very important role. That said, as shown here, it's extremely important for us to secure business planning, IT planning, and requirements definition. One key point is that we've now reached a stage where we can win RFPs, and I believe that's a major milestone. Even when competing against major consulting firms or large system integrators, we've started to win those competitions. Even without a competitive process, we're now being directly named and requested to support digital transformation initiatives. That's what I wanted to convey.
When we secure an RFP at the upstream phase, what happens is that we're able to take on everything downstream as well—design, development, testing, and operations. As written here, we have a track record of winning an RFP worth JPY 100 million, and once we secure that, we believe it leads to downstream projects worth around JPY 4 billion. This is the kind of opportunity we're talking about. We believe this creates a kind of shower effect, a cascading benefit. In that sense, we've been putting a lot of effort into our consulting business. Since last year, our revenue has grown by about 1.4 times, and just in the first half of the year, we've secured JPY 4.1 billion in business. On an annualized basis, that's about JPY 8 billion worth of projects, which we think is a significant achievement.
All of this includes the entire downstream process development, BPO, and operations. If we multiply that by 40, it comes to about JPY 320 billion worth of projects and our capabilities. Next, I'd like to talk about the capital and business alliance we announced with Rise Consulting . We ourselves have built up our consulting team over the past few years, and in terms of revenue, it has grown to a scale of JPY 8 billion. We've also reached the point where we can win RFPs. One of our strengths is our 2,000 active customers base. In the downstream processes, including development, we have strong capabilities in providing services such as operations and maintenance. I believe our strengths also lie in our overwhelming recruitment power, which allows us to bring in talent ranging from young professionals to senior experts.
On the other hand, Rise Consulting has strong business approach capabilities targeted at CXOs, as well as expertise in strategic consulting areas. Of course, there is some overlap with what we do. They also have the capability to secure RFPs, and in areas where we are still lacking, such as having a strong pool of core talent in their 30s and 40s, they are well-equipped. In that sense, when it comes to working with us, there's minimal overlap between us, and naturally, we believe we can collaborate in a way that creates synergy. That's why we've entered into this capital and business alliance. As I mentioned earlier, if we can secure projects from the upstream phase, such as requirements definition, we can potentially gain about 40 times more projects in the downstream phases.
This capital and business alliance with Rise Consulting , which helps us expand in that area, presents a significant opportunity for the future. That is how I see it. All right, next is the security business. Regarding the security business, we have been involved in vulnerability testing for quite some time, focusing on foundational and significant security measures. In this area, we have managed to grow to a scale where we are now leading the industry. In addition, recently, we have brought in some exceptionally talented security professionals, which has enabled us to offer high-level security consulting services. Now, the key point here is that while the operation and implementation of security are extremely important, the core area lies in being able to provide consulting at the highest level, conduct vulnerability testing, and of course, handle operations as well.
I believe a major point is that the number of projects involving this kind of implementation and operation work is increasing significantly. Just the first half of this year alone has generated JPY 2.7 billion in revenue. When annualized, it becomes a security business exceeding JPY 5 billion. This area has also grown by 1.3 times, 1.4 times in some aspects, so I believe it will become a significant source of revenue for SHIFT Group. Next, we have the BPO business that originated from Washer and I. As we've reported previously, it's only been a year and a half since we launched the service, but we've managed to capture the number one market share. This information support service, which helps manage SaaS, has achieved an impressive 43% market share. Currently, around 2,000 companies are using our service.
Since we distribute it for free, our business model is to increase touchpoints in this way, and from there, we aim to acquire BPO projects, areas where people absolutely have to be involved. As a result, the number of BPO customers has steadily grown to around 114 companies. In terms of monthly revenue, the business has developed to the point where it generates about JPY 260 million. Even though it's only been a year and a half, on an annualized basis, it's grown into a business that exceeds JPY 3 billion. What I want to convey is that it has grown into a fully-fledged business. In addition, what I'd like to share this time is that, in order to further accelerate our BPO efforts, we've established a dedicated consulting team.
Since we're distributing it for free, we also handle various tasks such as PC setup, security configuration, customer support, and security. There are all kinds of jobs in information system departments like these, but first, we start by breaking down the operations. We look for where inefficiencies exist, or whether there might be overspending, or perhaps certain tools and systems aren't being fully utilized. For example, there's a strong demand from customers who want to improve productivity by making better use of specific SaaS tools. There is a growing need for consulting that really strengthens the foundation of their operations. To address this, we've created a specialized team, and we're building it in a way that even employees in their second or third year after joining the company can handle the work.
We're aiming to develop this into a dedicated team, which will, of course, allow us to provide better services to our customers. At the same time, I believe it will serve as a key department for our consulting team to enhance their skills. By building such teams, we're looking to further improve our pay rate in both value-added services and BPO, business process outsourcing. Next, I'd like to report on our AI initiatives in connection with human capital management as part of our efforts toward SHIFT 3000. First and foremost, let me elaborate on our approach to human capital in detail. In the past, we used to talk about people, things, and money as key resources. Nowadays, money itself carries almost no interest, and goods are abundant in today's world.
In the internet industry in particular, where initial investment is naturally low, the focus is on achieving maximum efficiency. I believe we've entered an era where instead of people, things, and money, it's more like people, people, people, human resources have become extremely important. In that sense, how well we can leverage human capital is the key. I believe that this how well we utilize human capital will determine the success or failure of a company. Within that context, we are deeply committed to improving performance and operating profit. When you break it down, it's clear that a person's productivity changes depending on their motivation, as well as the tools they use to improve efficiency and the skills they possess. Naturally, these factors have a direct impact on productivity. We are thoroughly committed to enhancing these individual-driven factors.
Naturally, as a company, we aim to create a supportive environment, in other words, to improve the working conditions for our employees. By multiplying these factors together, we can achieve better performance. This time, we'd like to report on how we believe the combination of the office environment and AI-driven activities will have a significant impact. First, let's talk about the office. Our group has about 13,000 members in total, and each year, that number increases by 3,000-4,000 people. How we make the most of these members and whether they're working with high motivation becomes extremely important. In that sense, as you can see, while it's difficult to provide operational support effectively and efficiently to each and every one of the 13,000 members individually, I believe we can create a system to make that absolutely possible.
Now, as you might expect, what's written here is that, as stated clearly, if we were to prepare an office for each of the 13,000 members, it would cost us approximately about JPY 8 billion annually in total in office expenses. However, as you are aware, when it comes to the nature of our work, our work can be done from home. That means we can build an environment where people can work securely and stay highly motivated. Currently, the percentage of remote work is about 54%. By making use of remote work, the annual office rent amounts to approximately JPY 2.5 billion, which allows us to reduce costs by roughly JPY 6 billion. Naturally, we're using those JPY 6 billion in savings to pursue initiatives that leverage higher productivity.
One such initiative is our office located in Azabudai Hills, which we see as one way to boost motivation, so we're carrying out various initiatives. What's written here includes things like ongoing study sessions. We host a variety of events, employee gatherings, networking events with customers, welcome parties for new employees, team celebrations within departments, and so on. By continuously organizing these kinds of events, we end up holding around 1,500 events a year. Through these events, we aim to build motivation for learning and strengthen the bonds among coworkers. By getting to know worlds they weren't previously familiar with, employees can cultivate curiosity and similar qualities. This is something we've been actively working on.
As we mentioned last year as well, of course, the money we invested into this office, within about a year, we believe it's already leading to results that will allow us to recoup that investment. Moving on, as part of our goal to become an AI-native company, we've been working hard on this since the beginning of the year. First, we're aiming to increase the number of AI engineers. There are many types of AI engineers, from top-notch experts to those skilled in prompt engineering. We're dealing with a wide range of engineers, and we've launched an initiative to add 500 more this year. This is part of our talent management efforts. Within our talent management system, after conducting various surveys, we discovered that we already have around 500 such engineers within SHIFT.
We decided to convert those 500 members into AI-ready personnel who can provide AI-related services at any time. Originally, our goal was to hire 500 new engineers, but now, with this internal shift, we're aiming to reach about 1,000 over the course of the year. We plan to train AI engineers within the company and assign them accordingly so that we can provide a variety of services to our customers. First, before we start selling AI solutions externally, we're focusing on internal business reform. We're implementing various improvements using AI in areas like HR, sales, and delivery-back office operations. These reforms are part of our efforts to prepare for the upcoming SHIFT 3000 initiative, aiming to improve metrics such as gross profit margin and SG&A expense ratio, among others. We believe that these initiatives will play a key role in driving our policies forward.
We have been sharing the details of our efforts for quite some time now, and we believe that we are starting to see significant results, especially over the past six months. We would like to take this opportunity to introduce a portion of those efforts today. First of all, we have been working on fully utilizing AI. We have broken down our operations in detail to identify areas that can be replaced by AI, and we have actively started replacing them wherever possible.
As a result, we have identified as many as 825 tasks that can be handled by AI. These are the kinds of operational processes we are aiming to transition to AI. We are using AI to build these processes, and currently, 84% of all employees are utilizing AI. First and foremost, we believe it is extremely important as a company to get everyone very accustomed to using AI as a foundation.
Our initial goal is to raise the utilization rate to 100%, and we're strongly committed to achieving that. As a result, on a monthly basis, we've seen savings of around JPY 15 million, JPY 200 million in annual savings. We believe AI is deeply integrated into our daily operations, and we expect it will continue to become even more embedded ahead. Next, let's talk about human resources. We're actually quite well-known for our HR practices, and AI aligns very well with HR processes. We've decided to fully leverage AI in this area. With around 400 HR staff, we've chosen not to increase that number, and instead, we're working on enhancing our recruitment capabilities without expanding the team. One area where we've seen particularly strong results is in AI-based resume screening. We've seen tangible and measurable results.
Thanks to this, we're now able to review 20,000 resumes a year, and most of them can now be automatically summarized and screened by AI in a very efficient manner. As a result, we've managed to reduce the workload by 47%. I believe AI has brought about a significant boost in efficiency. Next, we have something called the AI mentor. One-on-one care is extremely important, but as the number of employees grows, the amount of time we can spend on each individual inevitably decreases. That was a challenge we faced. However, by introducing the AI mentor, even small concerns that employees wouldn't normally bring to HR, or minor worries, or even issues they might not feel comfortable discussing with their supervisors, they can easily and conveniently ask the AI about them.
This tool has an exceptionally high usage rate, and because it indeed enables mentoring for employees across the long tail, I believe it has been a very effective initiative. Next, let's talk about how AI is significantly improving efficiency in sales. In sales, one of the most important inputs is the very detailed meeting minutes from sales activities. Previously, when meeting with customers, salespeople would take notes manually by hand, then go back to the office to carefully organize them, and finally accurately input that information into SFA system. However, now, with the customer's permission, of course, we can record the conversation audio. Using AI, we dynamically summarize that conversation. We're working on initiatives to automatically register those summaries into SFA system, and I believe this will really help accelerate the process. In that sense, it could be beneficial for all salespeople.
We're distributing artificial intelligence recorders to all our salespeople, allowing meeting minutes to be automatically captured and summarized. The summarized content is indeed automatically registered and utilized in the next sales activities. In addition to that, artificial intelligence is also extremely useful for researching the customer's industry, investigating competitors, or identifying services or issues that the company might be struggling with. Since AI can naturally uncover a lot of information, we use it beforehand to research and understand the customer situation. This allows us to build a system where we can conduct more efficient interviews and make proposals without wasting the customer's time. Thanks to AI, we've been able to establish this kind of structure. Naturally, using this system, our proposal activities for customers have also benefited. AI accumulates know-how, so it can even automatically generate PowerPoint presentations, for example.
As I mentioned earlier, AI can take meeting minutes and automatically match them with the hundreds of services we have in-house, and then generate proposal documents for the customer. Initiatives like these are something we believe we are increasingly able to implement within our organization, and I think that reflects a strong belief we hold. Continuing on, this is indeed an initiative that we're working on independently, something that not many other companies are doing, I believe. We're currently thoroughly exploring the concept and idea that even board meetings could be supported by AI. We place a high value on governance, and our board members bring a wide range of experience, expertise from outside directors, critical thinking skills, and so on. We bring all of that together to conduct our board meetings.
Our board meetings are usually scheduled for four hours, but every time we end up running out of time. The discussions get so heated and engaging that they often stretch to five or even six hours. While this kind of passionate discussion is indeed a good thing for us, we're always thinking about how we can run the board meetings more efficiently within the limited time we have. We believe there's still room to make them even more efficient. We had always thought about it, but now, thanks to AI, we've been able to prove that it's actually possible. As it's written here, we can use AI in advance to identify agenda items that are likely to spark questions or discussions during the board meeting.
By utilizing advanced AI technology in advance to meticulously compile a comprehensive list of potential questions and thoroughly prepare anticipated Q&A or supporting materials, we have successfully managed to significantly reduce as much as possible the number of general questions that typically arise during board meetings. Consequently, only the most critical items that absolutely need to be confirmed and discussed during the board meeting remain. Fundamentally, I believe that this has, in a fundamental way, facilitated and empowered the board of directors composed of highly experienced and knowledgeable experts to engage in more in-depth and comprehensive non-linear discussions that AI cannot make decisions on. In a very significant and positive sense, this also contributes to compliance, and through uniquely human discussions, it naturally leads to benefits as a strategic shift for the future. That kind of contribution will likely play a role.
I believe we've now reached a point where we can dedicate time to discussions that involve envisioning the kind of future that could unfold in the mid to long term. All right, finally, I'd like to report on our group management initiatives as we move toward SHIFT 3000. Regarding the report on group management, one very important component is the current and ongoing status of M&A. Looking back, we've been steadily building a structure for M&A and PMI. In 2023, two years ago, we had a certain number of members, but by 2025, we've increased that to about 1.5 times more. What's different now is that, as you know, the key point is I believe we've now built a robust and solid foundation for overall sourcing capabilities, PMI capabilities, as well as comprehensive abilities to handle high-difficulty, large-scale M&A deals.
Thanks to that, we've just recently started receiving deals with much higher revenue figures, and in terms of volume, we're now able to handle a significantly larger number of cases than before. I believe that's a clear sign of the company's growth. In addition, we ourselves are not only focused on 100% M&A deals, but also increasingly involved in business investments and R&D-type investments, which have become extremely important for the future and more. Since we don't conduct R&D ourselves, we've started making small-scale investments in companies within the industry that possess strong technical capabilities or specialized knowledge. By forming capital and business alliances with them, we're working to expand our network. I believe this approach has now become possible thanks to our recent developments. Next, I'd like to talk about the group's reorganization process.
We ourselves have successfully carried out around 40 mergers and acquisitions so far, but rather than just increasing the number of companies, we're also working on integrating them effectively. This is part of that initiative. As written here, since Career Systems and SimTech themselves are engaged in very similar businesses to ALH, by integrating them into the ALH group, we are currently in the process of working on significantly streamlining the organization, and our goal is to efficiently provide similar services. Being able to ensure that we are doing this is extremely important for our success and sustainability. By working towards a more streamlined and efficient organization that can provide similar services in a more effective manner, we can manage and oversee various overlapping or similar services within a single, cohesive, and efficient company or organization.
I believe this will allow us to carry out PMI in a way that is even more productive. Finally, regarding SHIFT's progress toward SHIFT 3000, we've set our targets at JPY 130 billion in revenue, a gross profit margin of 33.5%, and JPY 13.5 billion in operating profit. Thankfully, in the first half of the fiscal year, our revenue performance has indeed exceeded expectations, and in terms of sales progress, we're right on track. As for operating profit, we've reached about 60% progress, so we're significantly outperforming expectations. That said, this term we want to firmly demonstrate that we're a company capable of generating solid gross profit and operating profit. First and foremost, we aim to deliver these numbers reliably. Looking ahead toward SHIFT 2000 and 3000, naturally we have targets such as gross profit margin and SG&A expense ratio.
Our top-line revenue is growing steadily at about 20%, so we believe that, including M&A, we can achieve our goals around the year of 2027 or 2028. However, the key point is that in aiming for SHIFT 3000, we need to hit our target gross profit margin of 35%. I believe we've started to build a structure that will allow us to reach that goal. Our SG&A expense ratio is also around 20%, which aligns with our target. I think we're steadily putting in place a solid framework to achieve an operating profit margin of 15%. That concludes the presentation. Regarding the second quarter financial results, we've been working on various strategic initiatives, and looking at the first half overall, I believe we've made solid and comprehensive progress toward the goals we promised last year, namely, building a strong top line and generating solid gross profit and operating profit.
I think we've been able to achieve a steady performance and overall performance in that regard. With that, we'll conclude the presentation. As we move toward our SHIFT 3000 goal, we as a group are committed to working hard together. We sincerely hope for your continued support. We are grateful for your presence and engagement. We look forward to achieving our goals with your support. Thank you very much for watching today.