It is time. We would like to begin CyberAgent's earnings briefing for FY 2023, third quarter. This session will be live streamed. Please refer to the disclaimer regarding the information we will be sharing with you today. President and CEO, Fujita, will take us through the results.
This is the CEO, Fujita. I would like to take you through the results of FY 2023, third quarter. From April to June was the third quarter for our company. First of all, overall, during this quarter, third quarter, the results were not that great. The media and ad sales have continued to increase steadily. Game business earnings were lower than we expected, and thus, profits dropped significantly. As a result, we have announced a downward revision to this fiscal year's forecast, which I will take you through later.
The media business, ABEMA-related sales progressed on track, and operating losses decreased steadily. For the ad business, we reached a record high sales. For the game business, the second quarter, the quarter before this quarter, we had multiple anniversary events, and as a backlash from that, we have seen lower sales and profits for this quarter. This is the consolidated sales. About two years ago, Umamusume started, and it has become a mega hit, and it has continued to expand, and it has started to normalize now. The baseline, we will continue to see increase in profits. This is the consolidated operating profit. The first quarter, two quarters ago, we had the FIFA World Cup, so we had extraordinary costs booked during this quarter.
For this quarter, the game business in the second quarter did so well, and it's, we're seeing lower levels this quarter because it's, we didn't have those anniversary events. This is the SG&A. In terms of the number of employees, we welcomed 431 new graduates to the group, so we have 7,241 employees as, of the end of this quarter. This is the P&L. This is the balance sheet. With respect to the FY 2023 forecast, when this fiscal year began, our IP, Umamusume, which is highly profitable, and we saw sales grew, but it was very difficult to forecast how the sales might, its growth might slow down. Unfortunately, that's why we provided the range.
Unfortunately, it slowed down more than expected, so we have revised the OP to JPY 25 billion, revised downwards, and we have revised our forecast downward. However, from going forward, our path looks bright. Two years ago, Umamusume started, and it became a social phenomenon and became a mega hit. We made a large upward revision twice during that fiscal year, but we have tried to land softly since then, and it's starting to normalize now. Unfortunately, it was somewhat, well, a harder landing than we expected, but Umamusume's performance, we will be able to normalize and absorb any impact going forward. Umamusume, we've seen some backlash this quarter, but we believe that it will become a title that will be loved for a long time going forward.
We have, the first phase, second phase, and third phase, and this is our 10-year journey. 10 years ago, we were focusing on increasing sales and profits, then we started making upfront investments into ABEMA. While we were making the upward investments, we gave birth to a mega hit, Umamusume, and it was very difficult to forecast then. It's been two years, and now we believe that we have come to an end. It's starting to normalize. At the same time, ABEMA's, upfront investments as well, we're reaching the final phase. Going forward, it will be more simpler. We are going to be committing to increasing sales and profits. That's how the top management sees our path going forward. I said that the path looks bright earlier, but there's are no negative, elements right now.
This is how we will achieve earnings growth. For the media business, every year, we booked JPY 20 billion in operating losses, so without that, we will be making JPY 20 billion more. Of course, the ABEMA has entered a loss reduction phase after the investment phase. In addition to that, we had the FIFA World Cup large losses booked in the 1st quarter, but we only, of course, going forward, it will settle down because the competition only happens once every four years. The ad business will continue to grow over the mid to long term. This business has continued to expand and increase profitability, and it still looks bright. It's doing well. The company, so a lot of our clients are doing very well as well, so that's going to be, have a positive impact on us.
There is a challenge in terms of operating margin, but improving the operating margin is a very high priority for this division. We might not see results right away, but next fiscal year onwards, we should start to see improvements in the OPM. For the gaming business, Umamusume: Pretty Derby, we booked high sales and profitability last fiscal, last quarter, and we're seeing an impact from that this quarter. It is becoming a service that can be loved for a long term. We believe that the future looks bright for this title and the game. We hope to keep the momentum going. Of course, each initiative takes time to plan. This fiscal year, we will be releasing a new TV anime, and we will also release a new console game as well.
We are continuing to invest in plan initiatives that will keep the momentum going. On top of that, we will be releasing two highly anticipated games, Final Fantasy and Jujutsu Kaisen, by the end of this year. We believe that those will also have a positive impact. That is why, although we made a downward revision, we want to ensure that the JPY 25 billion will be the bottom line, and going forward, we will simply commit to increasing sales and profitability. This is the for achievement rate based on the new forecast. We finished three quarters, and the remainder is about 25%, we believe that the downward revision is achievable, is reasonable. Going forward, we would like to look at the individual businesses.
As I mentioned before, we reached record high for the ad business, internet ad business. On the other hand, OPM is we're seeing a downward trend in the OP margin, and we're starting to address that already. We hope to, we plan to improve the OPM going forward. We also released the LLM to the general public, to the public. In terms of Gen AI, we are basically the only company in Japan that's booking sales and sales in this business. Of course, this will have more, this will be more effective because we will be using Gen AI, and we are already seeing results from this business. For the game business, I mentioned before that we're seeing a downward trend from the second quarter, because in the second quarter, it grew significantly.
Especially, Umamusume, our own IP, it does impact our profitability quite a bit, so that's the major impact that we saw for this quarter. We are implementing various initiatives and we are doing cross-media marketing. We're working with, we are going to be releasing manga, live events, and theater as well. We will also be releasing a Season 3 of the TV animation very soon, and we will be releasing new manga. We will also, make the console game available on Switch. Umamusume: Pretty Derby Party Dash! It's a great title. It looks like it's, it'll be a lot of fun. We can't really talk about all of the initiatives that we are planning right now, but we will make sure that the momentum will continue going forward as well.
This fiscal year, we will be releasing highly anticipated titles. One is Final Fantasy, and we finished the closed beta test already, and it will be released quite soon. Jujutsu Kaisen as well. A new season's animation has just begun, and the game. We want to make sure that we keep apace with that boom as well and release it by the end of the year. Next year onwards, we have not publicized this yet, but we are working on major titles. We have. It is great that we can finally release games that we've been working on for a long time, and it is taking longer and longer for us to release games, but we have highly anticipated games coming in the next year onwards as well.
For the media business, ABEMA's growth is contributing significantly, but every quarter we can't grow drastically. Over the mid to long term, we want to make sure that the ground will remain solid, and we can continue to grow. OP as well, the operating losses are also increasing. This is the breakdown of ABEMA, and this is the weekly active user, WAU. Over to mid to long term, we can see that it is growing, ABEMA is growing. With the World Cup, it grew drastically, but we continue to increase our user base, and we are seeing many couple weeks where we're exceeding JPY 20 million in WAU. For the sports business, sports industry, we have signed a partnership with KDDI, especially in terms of sports content acquisition.
We are putting a lot of effort into sports content acquisition and distribution as well, but it does take a lot of cost, and we want to make sure that it can be viewed by a lot of people as well. KDDI is going to be a very strong partner for us to enable us to do so. We are putting a lot of effort into sports and anime, but our partner, TV Asahi, we are working closely with them as well to distribute World Aquatics Championships, as well as All-Stars as well. We saw quite a significant growth. We will be, from August 6, you will be able to see all the high school baseball games on ABEMA as well. Please take a look. WINTICKET is continuing to grow very strongly.
Right now, the online bidding market is 42%. We also have a partnership with Netflix, and this is the first example of our partnership. Is She the Wolf? It has been available on Netflix since June 11th, and we're getting a lot of traction on that. We also have announced this already, but that Nelke Planning, which is a top company for 2.5-dimensional musical, and they have joined our fold. They are a very effective company in the industry, and they're creating a lot of great content, and they are very steady, stable, and highly profitable company. It is great that they have joined our group.
This is, you've seen this many times before, but we will continue to make sure that ABEMA will become profitable by ensuring the advertising association, VBB, and related business will perform well. Lastly, we have one, two, three, and four here, but this is the mid to long-term strategy. We went from the growth phase to ABEMA investment phase, and then we saw a big hit, Umamusume: Pretty Derby, and it has started to settle down and normalize. Going forward, we want to make sure that the JPY 25 billion will be the bottom line, and we want to, as a top management, focus on improving sales and profitability. We hope that you will continue to support us over the long term, even though we have made a downward revision. Thank you very much. That concludes my presentation.
This concludes CyberAgent's FY 2023 third quarter earnings briefing. If you should have any questions, please contact the IR team. Thank you for joining us today.