Studio, I'm Masaru Sugiyama, Raksul's Group CFO. Today, I want to talk about Raksul's first quarter earnings and also the recently announced management buyout and the board's recommendations about it. First and foremost, on the announced and planned management buyout, there has been an announcement from our management team, Yo Nagami, our Group CEO, as well as Yasukane Matsumoto, the Chairman of the Board of Directors, and also their partners, Goldman Sachs Group, Inc., about the tender offer for Raksul's common shares as part of the management buyout scheme. The tender offer price is JPY 1,710 per share, which represents a 36.8% premium to the share price of December 10, and also a premium versus the one-month share price of about 43.9%, last three months of about 48.6%, and last six months of 42.9%.
On the morning of December 11, our Board of Directors has convened and resolved to endorse the tender offer, and we recommend that the shareholders tender their shares to the tender offer. The details of the resolution are as follows: The Board of Directors expressed an opinion endorsing the offer and the management buyout and recommend that the company shareholders tender their shares to the tender offer and leave the decision of the holders of stock acquisition rights, stock options, as to whether or not to tender in the tender offer, and revision of the fiscal year-end dividend forecast to no dividends provided given that MBO is achieved. And in terms of the schedule going forward, the tender offer period starts from December 12 to February 4 of 2026. That's 33 business days.
The first extraordinary general meeting of shareholders after the tender offer will be in April of 2026. Now, I want to move on to the first quarter earnings. In terms of the progression of Raksul's expansion as a platform, we've executed and done really well in the first quarter. Our user base has grown to 3.47 million IDs in the first quarter, and our revenue has once again hit a record of JPY 17.2 billion. In terms of the summary for the first quarter, our revenue was up by 17.2%, gross profit was up by 20.2%, our EBITDA is up by 11.8%. As we mentioned in the beginning of the fiscal year in the Q4 earnings, this is the year to invest into the acceleration of growth. We've highlighted last time we posted that we'll be investing especially in the first half of the year.
Everything's going as planned or slightly exceeding the plans for the growth acceleration. For the procurement platform business, we've seen a revenue growth of 17.9% and gross profit growth of about 20.8%. Organic growth of this business, our e-commerce business, has been at high levels at 15.1% in the quarter. We made some progress in terms of the cross-selling activities that we talked about last time and will be building onwards towards the end of the year. We've also announced and entered a strategic partnership with Canva, Australia's world's largest, one of the world's largest design platforms. We now provide users with functions where you can access and download data from Canva on Raksul, and also on Canva, you can print with Raksul. Moving on to the marketing platform business, the revenue grew by 11.7%, the gross profit is up by 18.8%.
Now, in this business, we mentioned at Q4 that gross profit we expect to grow by about 30%. We fell short of that partly because of some volatilities coming from advertising projects. Some projects have shifted to the second quarter. However, there's no change in impact to the full-year earnings at this point and we have also released a new service called Raksul Pay, which allows small businesses to install online payment solutions and next, in our corporate actions, in terms of the progress in our M&A activities, we've announced two deals in the quarter. One is a company called TeamLike, which operates a service called ViniPro, which provides plastic transparent curtains for shops and factories. This adds another top market share niche product to the Raksul's platform and the other one is Hanko Bugyo, which is a business we have acquired from a company called Dandelion Inc.
This business is in addition to our seals and stamps business, makes the seals and stamps business more scalable, and further boosting the productivity of the business, and in terms of new businesses, we've launched a Raksul Bank at the end of November, providing a highly convenient and economic financial experience to SME users and also existing Raksul users, and in terms of the track record of growth, zooming out, year over year, we have been achieving consecutive revenue, gross profit, and EBITDA growth, and this year so far, as you can see on the very right of the graph, the range is the fiscal year earnings estimates. We haven't changed that number, and we're tracking very well to this guidance figure. Another way to look at our longer-term growth is comparing the gross profit growth as well as EBITDA margin versus gross profit.
This sort of shows our earnings in kind of a Rule of 40-like manner. Our gross profit growth has been consistently above 20%, and our EBITDA margin versus gross profit has consistently been rising throughout the years. This year, we're expecting margins to rise towards the end of the year. Therefore, when you look at 2026, in four quarters total, we expect margins to be above the levels of the previous year. In terms of the quarterly performance and also the outlook into the later parts of the year, in terms of the first quarter, the numbers exceeded the initial forecast with 20.3% gross profit growth and also 12% EBITDA growth while executing growth investments as we announced at the beginning of the year.
For the second quarter, we expect more than 20% year-over-year growth for the group gross profit and over 10% year-over-year growth for EBITDA as we continue to be in an investment phase. And for the year, both gross profit and EBITDA, we expect to show growth weighted towards the second half of the year. So at this point, we're showing gross profit growth that is higher than EBITDA growth, but towards the end of the year, the EBITDA growth will catch up to the gross profit growth, we think. And in terms of the progress that we're making versus the four-year forecast, as you can see, we're tracking relatively well versus the average of the last three years so far in all levels in revenue, gross profit, and also in EBITDA levels.
This is for, we haven't changed the annual forecast for fiscal year 2026, and we can say that we're tracking relatively well to this forecast, and this is revenue by segment. All segments are growing double digits at this point. This year, this quarter in particular, within procurement platform, new consolidation is not too big, so most of the subsegments are growing organically, and we're happy to say that they're all growing above mid-teens at this point, and also in terms of the trends of the gross profit, we have also seen a consecutive growth here as well, and also margin improvements have been happening across the board, and in terms of the EBITDA growth, we have also shown consecutive growth here, and volatility of EBITDA is smaller compared to the past, partly due to growth investments being scattered around throughout the year.
And also this year, we expect quarterly EBITDA to hit more than JPY 2 billion towards the later half of the year, basically paving the way for us to achieve the JPY 10 billion EBITDA target that we put out for 2027. In terms of the SG&A trend, as you can see, we have invested extensively into marketing, technology, and also people. This is the reason why we're showing growth in all of these three subcategories of expenses. Advertising expenses are growing due to our marketing investments going into new customer acquisition, as well as trying to ignite cross-selling on the platform. Technology investments have grown versus the previous year, mainly because of our investments into common ID infrastructure, better experience for our shoppers. And other category in expenses includes most of the headcount. The addition of sales basically goes into this bucket.
Going into the procurement platform business, we have seen continuous organic growth rate. So Q1 organic growth was 15.1%. This is similar to the rate in Q4, so we're continuing to be in the high levels in terms of organic growth, but we, of course, want to accelerate this towards the end of the year. And in terms of gross margins, we've hit 33.1%, which is second to the third quarter last year. This margin expansion has been driven by scale expansion of the platform and also strategic in-house manufacturing as well. And in terms of the user base of our platform, we're at 3.47 million, paving ways for us to become one of the largest SME platforms in Japan. And going into the KPI of the business, in the procurement platform business, we've seen an organic growth of user base by about 7.4%.
Raksul ID users, thanks to ID integration, has grown by 39.6%. And towards the right-hand side of the page, you can see that average number of purchases per user has grown by about 4.7%, which is a record in the last three years. And average revenue per order has grown by 0.7% in the quarter. Part of the reason why the average number of purchases are growing faster at this point is because of the effect of activities to entice cross-selling on our platform. Moving on to the marketing platform business, partly driven by the impact of new consolidation of Fusion, both revenue and gross profit for the business overall has grown, expanded. However, on the profit side, we're showing zero EBITDA on this graph, but this is partly due to, as I mentioned earlier, some advertising activity slipping into the second quarter.
So if you look at the four-year, we expect the EBITDA of this segment in total to be well above that of the previous year. We're expecting profit growth for the full year. And in terms of the details of this segment, in the ad agency business, Fusion has added to the gross profit growth, as well as us being able to serve both online and offline demand. But as I mentioned earlier, we observed some demand slipping from Q1 to Q2, so we expect growth in the second quarter and basically no impact to the annual outlook. In the SME marketing, the very bottom of the graph on the left-hand side of the page, we saw consecutive growth thanks to expansion of the website builder business and also the payment solutions. In the SaaS business, we're gradually shifting our focus from very large enterprise to medium-sized clients.
The number of users has remained flat year over year, but we expect this shift in client focus will be paying off in the next three to six months. This is where our balance sheet is. The ratio of goodwill against our equity is 41.9%, a very healthy balance sheet at this point. Net debt is JPY 2.5 billion, which is a 0.26 times EBITDA. Plenty of room for leverage at this point. Initiative for expanding our ecosystems, the two acquisitions I mentioned earlier, Hanko Bugyo, as well as TeamLike. Hanko Bugyo is a company that specializes in stamps and personalized stationery, and it is one of the top players in the category on platforms like Rakuten.
We aim for expansion, expanding our market share in the stamps domain, and also because of the combination of two companies, Hankoya.com that we already have, and also Hanko Bugyo. We believe that our production capacity for Shachihata and other customized stamp category will be much stronger. In terms of performance, the business performance, it's as it says at the bottom here. This adds scale to our stamps and seals business. TeamLike is a B2B ordering platform for vinyl curtains and related products. Many of the customers they serve are shops, factories, and warehouses, and it is a top position in a very niche category, but very essential to many businesses. This is sort of exploratory for our business portfolio, but it is a very high-quality business that we believe is a valuable addition to our platform.
For both of these acquisitions, the EBITDA is managed, EV to EBITDA multiple is managed relatively well, both of which are mid-single-digit EV to EBITDA multiples. This is the track record of our acquisitions in the last three years, plus number one, which was in 2022. Our consecutive acquisition strategy has gradually become a good track record here. Some of the initiatives that we have announced in the first quarter, one is our strategic partnership with Canva. This agreement allows Raksul to become the prime printing partner of Canva here in Japan. Designs that users have created on Canva can be printed directly on Raksul, and also users can log into Canva on Raksul and download designs and print them on Raksul as well.
Canva is a very strong design platform globally, and there are many small to medium-sized or some consumers that are designing materials on paper, website, and other things as well. We're expecting new businesses to arise from the Canva partnership. And also, Raksul Bank has launched on November 27th. Raksul Bank, as we have released in the past, is a neobank model using the banking-as-a-service platform of GMO Aozora Netbank. We have achieved in this service an industry-leading low transfer fees of JPY 119 compared to around JPY 550 of regional banks in Japan. And also, whenever users use the Raksul Bank debit card, they are rewarded 2% Raksul Point, which is usable on the Raksul platform.
And also, in terms of hurdles for opening the account, as long as you have the right credentials and paperwork, using EKYC, business account opens as fast as same day, providing a very different experience, different and convenient experience to SME banking that industry needs. And we're aiming to provide a very user-friendly and also fee reduction, and also in the future, improving cash flow of the small businesses that work with Raksul. And in terms of the Q&A that we anticipate, we have put in the slide here, so please do take a look at analyst briefing on December 12th. We don't expect it to take questions on the management buyout itself, but we're happy to discuss anything of concern between myself and also the investor relations team.
So if you have any questions, concerns, comments, please reach out to ir@raksul.com or contact us directly or through a securities broker. Thank you very much.