Everyone. I'm Scott Callon. Thank you so much for joining. Working off of the FY 2025 three, so the March 2025 fiscal year first quarter corporate presentation that's right in front of us, and also available on our website. Let me start before going into today's discussion by expressing our sympathies to all those affected by the earthquake yesterday in Kyushu. It was quite a shake. A 7.1 magnitude, very disruptive. I do think we should probably also point out, this is an example of how Japan is just extraordinarily capable of dealing with these kinds of natural disasters. A quake of that size, no deaths, only 16 injuries. It's just, again, remarkable how strong Japan is in this area. But it was disruptive and we extend our heartfelt hopes for everybody in terms of the recovery process. I'm going to turn to the Q1 overview.
We did a lot this quarter. Rapid progress in our game-changing eLEAP technologies. We've invented a more advanced form of OLED. I'll talk a little bit more about that later in the presentation day. We're on track for mass production in December of this year. We had a robust OLED and automotive demand driving our sales growth, particularly OLED, which is very important to us. The world is switching over to OLED, had 41% year-on-year growth. We have the losses on core sales growth, improved product mix, fixed cost reduction, and tighter inventory management. So literally, improvements in EBITDA, 51%, OP, 49%, OP operating profit, of course, net income of 53%. Normally, Sharp announces their earnings the day before we do, so everyone has a chance to see those. They announce it at the same time as us.
Just so you know, we've got sales up 6% year-on-year and a halving of our operating losses. Sharp in its display business, had sales down 26%, 27% and no improvement on the operating side. So it does describe a quarter where we did relatively well relative to one of our key peers. The operating environment continues to be challenging. We've got a lot of work to do, and we're continuing to do it. We are going to drive and are driving a radical transformation of profitability. Look, we have their operating losses year-on-year. That's super important for us to get to where we need to be. We expect to be EBITDA positive in the second half of this year. There's huge demand for eLEAP. We're working with the Wuhu government on launching a large-scale eLEAP fab, and that's just going fine.
Turning to the next page, one of the key deliverables we have is to deliver global number one tech, meaning technology that no one else has. I mean, that sounds hard. I have to tell you, it is hard. But it is a lot easier path to profitability than having technology where three or four or five very strong Asian competitors have equivalent capabilities. This is absolutely fundamental to delivering huge value for not only our customers, for our shareholders. Like eLEAP, which is a JDI technology which we invented and is first in the world and an extraordinary improvement over current OLED technology, we are delivering over and over and over out of our labs. Not just labs, but in bringing to mass production new technology. We announced last week the first automotive-grade dual touch, 2VD display.
You literally take one display and make it into two displays. It is really interesting tech. I will talk about that. We have the world's highest resolution, ultra-high resolution VR running on glass, which is low cost. You can deliver normally what used to take super expensive silicon, to deliver the kind of performance we can deliver on glass. We believe, well, I mean, it is the case, we are way ahead of everybody on being able to do high resolution on glass. We have telecom technology that we are rolling out. I mean, JDI really wants to go beyond displays. Displays is a tough market. I mean, the great thing about displays is they are fundamental and foundational for modern life, and there is also a bunch of competition out there.
Going outside of displays into new areas is important to us. We have got some technology that is deeply relevant in communications. We developed ZINNSIA, a brand new set of sensor technologies that is really interesting. I will touch on this later in the presentation. Finally, something that is important that is happening is there is a reconfiguration of supply chains that is going on. It means Japan has become far more important as a strategic manufacturing base, and JDI has also. We have got a surge, friendshoring, in other words, moving kind of your supply chains to allies that is going on, that is being driven by JDI customers. Really four messages here.
One, eLEAP is on track and will be absolutely transformational, not only for the industry and our customers, but for JDI. Two, we are hitting the numbers we need to. A huge improvement year-on-year on the operating side, putting us on track to get to EBITDA profitable in the second half of the year. Three, we are delivering on brand new technologies that no one else can do that will create powerful value for our customers and also for our shareholders. Four, there is something very big going on geopolitically and restructuring the supply chains, and we are a big beneficiary of that. I will now turn it over to Hiko before I come back for some more details.
Hello, everyone. I am Hiko Sakaguchi, and I will be speaking to the earnings results for the first quarter of the fiscal year ending March 2025. With that, I am going to jump to slide 11. For the first quarter, sales came in at JPY 55.9 billion. That is a 6% increase year-on-year versus the first quarter of last year, where we reported JPY 53 billion. I will talk a little bit more in detail about the composition of sales on the next slide. For now, just please understand that we typically categorize our revenue into core business revenue and non-core business revenue. As you can see, our core business revenue is strongly up 11% versus the previous quarter. I am sorry, versus a first quarter of fiscal 2023, finishing in at JPY 50 billion.
Our non-core business, which is effectively our LCD smartphone business, is down 27% versus the first quarter of last year, only because we are strategically shrinking that business towards exiting that business. If you look at the profit lines, EBITDA came in at a JPY 6 billion loss, and operating profit came in at a JPY 7 billion loss. We are still in negative territory, but as Scott Callon mentioned earlier, we have effectively halved losses versus the first quarter of last year. In addition to the top-line growth helping with that, with the improvement in our profitability, we have also radically improved our product mix, and that is really a result of us restructuring our product portfolio out of our non-core business and into our core businesses, which of course, enjoy higher profitability overall.
We have also continued to relentlessly cut on fixed costs where we can, and we have also really been a lot tighter in terms of our inventory control. All those together is what has enabled us to halve our losses versus the first quarter of last year. Same thing with the bottom line. In addition to everything I mentioned earlier, net income came in at a JPY 6.5 billion loss. In addition to all of the factors I mentioned for the operating loss line, we also reported an extraordinary gain of JPY 1.7 billion from the sale of our Higashiura, our former Higashiura fab, that we completed. The sale was completed on April 1st of this year. Now diving a little bit deeper into the breakdown of our sales. The upper half shows our core businesses and the lower half our non-core businesses.
As you see, the core businesses are comprised of our automotive business and the smartwatch and VR business. Automotive was up very strongly, 16% versus the previous first quarter. A little bit of a FX tailwind there, but more importantly, we saw very strong customer demand, including demand on some of our new products, and we were successfully able to capture that demand. That is really what contributed to that 16% increase in automotive. Same thing with smartwatch and VR. We saw very strong demand for our OLED product lineup. VR was a little bit weak, but the strength in our OLED more than offset the weakness in our VR top line. So overall, an 11% year-on-year gain in terms of our revenue for our core businesses. As I mentioned earlier, our non-core businesses are primarily our LCD smartphone business.
We have been mentioning over the past year and a half, we are strategically shrinking this business as we transform our portfolio. As expected, our revenues in this particular product line is down versus the first quarter of last year. This slide here shows the change in operating profit from the first quarter of last year to the first quarter of this year. As we have been mentioning several times, we have halved our operating losses from roughly JPY 14 billion to JPY 7 billion this year. A little bit of a FX tailwind there, as you see on the left-hand side. On the far right-hand side, you see the effect of the fall off of the inventory valuation losses that were reported first quarter of last year. Probably most importantly is that bar in the middle there, that JPY 1.8 billion gain from the mix improvements.
That is everything I mentioned earlier in terms of how we are transforming our business portfolio out of non-core businesses into more profitable core businesses. That is starting to really show effect there with that middle bar right there. This slide here shows the change in operating profit from the fourth quarter of last year into the first quarter of this year. As you see, it is slightly down. This is all seasonality. I think as you may already know, first quarter tends to be the weakest quarter of all four quarters for JDI. This year is no exception. What you see here is effectively seasonality. That is it for the first quarter earnings results. I will talk just a little bit about our guidance, our forecast for the current year that is ending March 2025.
This slide is no different from the slide that we presented this past May. Which is to say that our forecast remains the same. We are still looking to deliver JPY 221 billion of top-line revenue, roughly an JPY 11.7 billion loss at the EBITDA line, and an JPY 8.2 billion loss at the operating profit line. All of this is on the back of the strategy that I have been mentioning several times. We are radically trying to improve the profitability of our business portfolio, shifting out of non-core into core businesses. We are striving still at this point to hit EBITDA profitability in the second half of this year. Nothing has changed on this slide, as well as this slide here. This is, again, this is a reuse of a slide from our presentation this past May.
This shows the change in operating profit going from the first half of this year into the second half of the same year as well. As we explained in May, what we are expecting to see is an accelerated sort of improvement in our operating loss as we move into the second half of the year. It is just a manifestation as we continue to transform our business portfolio towards stronger profitability. We are also looking to monetize where we can some of the licensing from our new technology such as eLEAP and HMO. We are all striving towards that. That is what you see in that middle box right there called Mix. It is a combination of just a stronger business portfolio, as well as some licensing business there. Again, no change to this slide. With that, I am going to hand it right back to Scott. Thank you.
All right. I am going to go through the business and Meta Growth 2026 update. This is 30 plus slides. I do not intend to go through every single one, yet it feels like we should kind of remind you of what we are up to, why we are doing what we are doing, what the kind of core business strategy is. Please allow me to address that for all of you. I think the core of our growth strategy, which we announced two years ago is, look, this is a radical transformation of JDI. We expect of ourselves and our customers tell us that we are capable of this, so that we need to deliver as a global number one technology leadership. That is what we are doing. We use the word meta to describe big in size.
We could have called it mega, we could have called it giga. The goal is not to do something small, to do something very, very big on a scale that is meaningful. That reflects the fact that displays are a foundational technology for modern society. I mean, they are everywhere. The AI revolution is real, and it uses compute in a very powerful way. Guess what? The compute shows up in our lives via displays. Displays continue to be not only ubiquitous and growing, we are in a technology area that is deeply important for customer and social value, and we can improve people's lives, and we are going to.
Three key pillars of the strategy. One, global number one technology leadership. I touched on this a little bit earlier. It is hard to be number one, but it is even harder to deliver a profitability by being number two, number three, or being tied with three other firms. It is fundamental to us that we deliver a technology that no one else is capable of, and we are doing that. Two, the market leading tech part reflects the global number one. We need the growth to be transformational. It is not interesting for us to do something small. The good news is that we can do something very, very large at scale, with technology that other people don't have and deliver significant value for not only our customers, but our shareholders.
Three, climate change is real. Environmental damage that is occurring across the globe is real. We need to be green. We need to be sustainable. We are committed to being so. I touched on this a little bit earlier. Global number one technology, it is certainly something we are doing with eLEAP, with a transformational next generation OLED, but it is across the board. As examples, this technology is fantastic. I hope you join me in absolutely loving tech and its ability to move the world forward, and it is magical. We have developed very high precision sensor interface, which we are branding as ZINNSIA, that goes through all sorts of materials so you can just turn anything into a sensor and the touch controls. We are coming to market with this.
Every customer, we have shown it to you, and if there is a customer on the call, we welcome inbound from you because we will show you all the different demos we have for it. This is really interesting technology. It is powerful. It is coming to market very soon. As another example, we are the world's best at ultra-high resolution VR. I mentioned this earlier. You probably know this, but the issue with VR is the displays are very close to your eyes.
You are using lenses in order to magnify them to get the full immersion effect. Typically, it is a 7X lens or a 10X lens, which means that if it is 10X lens, it means you are cutting the actual PPI, the resolution experienced by the user by 10 times. It does not feel like it is 1,200 PPI. It feels like 120. There is a voracious demand for high PPI, for high resolution, and it needs to be cost effective. The problem with silicon is it is very, very expensive. JDI is pioneering the ability, and it is truly unmatched to deliver super high-end resolution at a very low cost class substrate. Again, coming to you soon. This is also like magic. It is really fantastic. We have developed very high performance, what we call 2VD, 2 Vision Displays.
You take a single monitor and you run totally different content on it. For example, this is an example of an auto case. The driver is looking at whatever the driver is looking at, GPS, road information. The passenger is watching a movie or watching the Olympics. This is not only for autos. It actually has dual touch too, so you can both be on touching the screen at the same time, two different people, the driver and the passenger in this case. The touch does not interfere with each other. It is literally taking a single display and making it into two displays. It is not only for auto applications. You can do it vertically, you can do it horizontally. You can have two people sharing the same laptop or tablet, kind of and having completely different functionality real time. You can switch to, let's share it together.
It's enormously powerful tech. It's a way of taking. The reason why it's very powerful for autos is because as displays proliferate in autos, for example, passenger displays, so you want to give the passenger a display. The problem is if passengers want to have a big display, it interferes with the airbag. You've got very constrained space. This is a technology that we had kind of 10 years ago, and we had a competitor that was also involved in it. The technology was, to use a technical word, crap. The visual experience, the image quality was terrible. There was no dual touch. We've solved for both of those problems. We're the world's first doing that. This again, this technology will come to you very soon.
It's coming to you on autos, and it's coming to you across a range of applications that we think will be very powerful. We have deployed our world-class expertise on liquid crystals to generate advanced telecommunication. Excuse me. I'm notionally a native speaker in English, so hopefully I can get through this call, this web presentation. There's things we're working on with big telecom operators to allow them to do more in 5G, which has some challenges in creating the transmission and communication coverage that users need. That would be four examples of things that we're doing in terms of world-class technology. Again, we are continuing to take out costs and to take out assets. The problem with the display business historically has been it combines asset heaviness with low profitability. That doesn't work. We're taking out both assets and increasing our profitability.
Let me touch a little bit what's going on geopolitically. I think probably the next slide is really the important one. I touched upon this earlier. There is a reconfiguration of supply chains going on. It's happening. It's happening most prominently in the U.S. auto industry. It is expanding to European autos, and of course, going on also in U.S. and European consumer companies. Geopolitical risks are rising. There is a need to figure out how to deliver customer value in a more diversified way. China is a fantastic place to produce, and if all you do is produce in China, then that can possibly create some risk for you as a company. Japan is very, very good at high-end manufacturing. JDI is very good at high-end manufacturing. There has been a surge in activity.
I think we're guessing a little bit as to why this is the case, that we're seeing so much more literally over the last four months, certainly in the U.S. in particular. Perhaps it's linked to the U.S. election, where there is activity on the part of both parties to increase tariffs in a very significant way with respect to China. This is possibly a game changer for us. This is a major shift in production activity, which we are welcome and ready for. We'll see how far we can run forward with this. One of the ironies is that JDI has switched over to OLED, and as we should. OLED is taking over the world. But it's interesting that there is, in a way, arguably a bigger shortage of, for example, non-China LCD capacity than there is a non-China OLED capacity.
This is directly impacting our ability to create a step change of profitability from what we thought was more of a commodity LCD business, maybe coming back in a big way. We're working on eLEAP. I think I've talked about this over- and- over. I'm hopeful that many of you are aware of what eLEAP is. It stands for environment positive lithography, mass-less deposition, extreme long life, low power, high luminance, any shape patterning. The key is lithography. We are taking what has classically been a kind of a deposition process, which uses huge, what are called fine metal mask, FMM, and substituting semi-technology lithography, and it's very, very powerful. It is our core hypothesis that OLED is a winning display technology and eLEAP is the winning OLED technology. OLED is fantastic. I won't go in great length. I think you all know this, but it's better.
It offers a series of characteristics that are super powerful. This is why OLED is taking share every single year. The world display technology is moving to OLED. This would be an example of it. I promised you I'm not going to talk about every slide, so I won't. We believe that OLED has significant advantages over both MicroLED and MicroOLED, other competing technologies, and therefore it wins. The upside opportunity in terms of what the growth market uptake looks like is very big. Smartphones that already moved over 50% OLED, we think that these other market segments also go there. So a big opportunity. And there are some challenges with OLED, specifically short lifetime and high production cost. eLEAP solves for both. Some sense of how that works is on this page.
You can see on the left-hand side, we've got conventional OLED with only 20% aperture ratio, meaning kind of 72% of the space on the display is actually black. And that's because these huge metal masks don't have enough tolerances to place pixels next to each other, because otherwise you have red and green and blue on top of each other, and you have terrible display quality. Because we switched to a semiconductor process of lithography, we don't have the metal mask limitations, and we can stick pixels really close to each other. That either delivers higher brightness or much higher pixel count. So we have the ability to break through with very high resolution OLED, for example, for the VR space in a way that is not possible conventional OLED. That also generates a long lifetime. You can see how much better our lifetime is than conventional OLED.
That is directly related to the fact that we have less black space and more pixel space. Because the problem with running, again, on the left-hand side of the page, running conventional OLED is you have to put a ton of current through this black space in order to try to create more brightness in the small brightness area. Because we increase the brightness area by two times, you can run less current, and you do not burn out your organic pixels. That is why eLEAP has better lifetime and higher brightness. We also are cheaper to produce. You get rid of all these costs that are related to fine metal masks. We can cut all the production costs by 30%. This is why eLEAP is a game changer. It is better and it is cheaper at the same time. It is more environmental.
You do not need all these chemicals, so it is better for water in terms of trying to wash these fine metal masks. You do not have to move around huge metal masks. Literally, the amount of CO2 emission in our process is only half that of conventional OLED. This is better technology across the board. Done a bunch of work on it. We are improving really fast. I will run forward. You should know we announced the world's highest brightness single stack OLED recently, 1,600 nits on conventional, relative to conventional OLED, which is typically running at 400. We won the Display Device Innovation Gold Award at Display Innovation CHINA, it is in the major Chinese display conference. I think it was actually two months ago. So just very recently. We run forward.
Three months ago, we showed our current production yield for eLEAP at above 60%. It is now above 70%. We are on track. We are going to go into mass production in December of this year, so the end of this year. And we think we complete the third display revolution. A long time ago, cathode ray tubes were amazing. They brought moving pictures into the home, and then they were huge and bulky and massive. They were replaced by LCD. LCD has all these challenges. OLED is kind of replacing LCD. We think we complete the revolution by bringing eLEAP to bear on behalf of consumers everywhere. It is a game changer. It is a massive market. We expect to be the undisputed global OLED leader. Thank you very much. Appreciate your time. And happy to take any questions or comments from anybody.
Moving on to a Q&A session. If you have any questions, kindly click the Raise Hand button or feel free to send them through the chat. It appears there are no questions at this time, so we will conclude today's briefing.
Thank you very much, everybody. Have a great morning, afternoon, evening. We run forward. Take care.