Welcome, everyone. We will now begin Japan Display Inc's Third Quarter Earnings Briefing for the Fiscal Year ending March 2024. We appreciate you taking the time to join us today. The materials we will be using are available on our website. Please be aware that we are recording today's briefing, and it will be uploaded on YouTube later. Unfortunately, our CEO, Scott Callon, who was scheduled to speak today, cannot attend. We apologize for his absence. Our CFO, Hiko Sakaguchi, will be presenting today.
Let's get started. Hiko, over to you.
Hello, everyone. Thank you so much for taking the time to join our third quarter earnings presentation today. As just mentioned, Scott Callon is not with us today, so I will be speaking to both the earnings overview as well as the earnings results. Before I get started, we would like to wish our deepest condolences to the families and the friends of the many, many people who lost their lives in the Ishikawa Prefecture earthquake, and also extend our heartfelt sympathies to all those people affected. We truly hope for the swiftest possible recovery for all of those people affected. With that, I am going to move on to the earnings overview for our third quarter. Today, I am going to mainly talk about three points.
The first one, which you see on the screen right now, is about the earthquake in the Ishikawa Prefecture and its impact on us. As we have announced in our press releases, our fab up in Ishikawa was impacted by the earthquake. Specifically, the fab suffered from bursting pipes. We had water leakages. Equipment were stopped, damaged. We had misalignment of precision equipment. The Ishikawa Fab really did suffer from the quake. That doesn't stop us. The very next day, on January 2nd, we assembled a task force of about 70 people, to immediately begin our recovery efforts. With many thanks to the task force and many other people within JDI, and in addition to that, with the tremendous help from a lot of our suppliers and equipment makers, we were able to get the plant partially back online as of January 24th.
Only a week later, on January 31st, we were fully back into production. So far, today is February 9th, we have been running the plant without any particular problems so far. The plant was offline for roughly a month. With the combination of the inventory we had at hand and also with the ability now that the plant is back up and running to make up for the lost production in February and March, we think we can actually make up for it. The expectation as of now is that despite the impact on the fab, we don't expect earnings for this year to be significantly impacted for that. We are going to continue to examine this. If things change, we will let you know.
But the expectation so far is that we don't expect for the fact that the fab was down to have any significant impact on our current year earnings. The second point that I would like to speak to is the fact that OLED is going great. As we've explained before, OLED has recently turned profitable for us, our OLED business. It is a strategic part of our core business, and it is really progressing very smoothly. As you're all aware, the display market, in general, is experiencing a shift from liquid crystal displays, LCDs, into OLEDs. So OLED is a growing industry. And within that growing industry, I think JDI is very strongly establishing itself as a technology leader within the OLED space. And we're seeing that on the back of very strong customer demand for our products.
Also in the fact that we are very steadily growing our market share. Our fabs with respect to OLED are running at 100%. We have more customer demand than our capacity can meet. This is a great opportunity. We expect our next generation eLEAP line to come online later this calendar year, so we hope to make up for some of the shortage in capacity as we start to launch our eLEAP line later in the calendar year. We're forecasting that full-year sales growth versus last year for our OLED business is going to be up 76% year on year, and we expect that growth to continue on into next year, the year ending March of 2025 and beyond. As we explained in the November half-year earnings, our OLED business has turned profitable.
We've really been able to realize the economies of scale, and that's going very steady for us. But it doesn't just end there. There's a lot of excitement about our next generation OLED technology, what we call eLEAP. In addition to all the functional advantages that the technology offers, it also has some very unique and unmatched cost advantages. We think between the functional and the cost advantages, this is going to be a huge ongoing driver in the future for our OLED business. In addition to that, as you're all aware, we are currently in negotiations with the city of Wuhan, China, to jointly launch an eLEAP plant in China, which, once it comes online, would effectively expand our eLEAP capacity by 50x . And those discussions, they're progressing very smoothly.
We're really working towards getting that eLEAP plant realized in China. The third point, however, is despite the strength in our OLED business, our conventional LCD business does remain unprofitable. We are very keenly aware of this and are very aware that we need to make some radical transformations to change the situation. We're committed to getting this done, and we will get this done. We have an ongoing sort of relentless look in terms of where we can take out costs. In line with our METAGROWTH 2026 growth plan, we're going to explore every avenue where we can leverage our unique global number one technologies to create either new technologies, businesses, or products to help drive improved profitability for our LCD business.
And just as we did with our OLED business, we really want to get our LCD business to a point where we can similarly realize economies of scale. We really need to load up our fabs, get our capacity utilization on our LCD fab lines higher, to the point where we can start seeing some economies of scale and have those contribute towards this particular business, the LCD business, improving in terms of profitability, and then hopefully someday turning profitable as well. There are also some interesting industry trends occurring now that present some opportunities for not only JDI, but the industry at large. One of them is that there is a shortage of supply for high-performance LTPS LCD displays.
And in addition to that, there is a geopolitical risk avoidance, or manufacturers are trying to move part of their production away from locations like China and Taiwan to mitigate some of the geopolitical concerns out there. The combination of the shortage for LTPS-based LCD panels as well as the shift away from China and Taiwan, some of that capacity shifting away from that, is an opportunity for JDI to sort of capture that demand, and use it to help boost the utilization of our fabs. Also, not just for JDI, but these also present very interesting opportunities for the industry at large and, for example, consolidation of the industry. We're carefully monitoring these movements and trends within the industry and making sure that we stay on top of them and we monetize where we can monetize on them.
It's not just about fixing our LCD business. We're looking, certainly even beyond that, we're effectively trying to transform our entire business model. So in addition to growing the already profitable OLED business, trying to fix the profitability issue of our LCD business, we're looking at new businesses, new products. One such example of that is a brand-new product that we just announced this past Tuesday on February 6, which is a smart ring technology, which we call Virgo. So this is exciting. It sort of adds to our existing line of new businesses, such as our transparent displays, our Free lighting. We think that these new businesses, as they grow, will also help to diversify our business portfolio and really strengthen the overall profitability profile of our business going forward. So that's what I have for the overview for our third quarter earnings.
I want to talk now about our results. I'm going to start with the nine-month cumulative results as of the third quarter. As you see on the screen, sales was JPY 180 billion for us. EBITDA and operating profit, both still at a loss. EBITDA was JPY -23 billion. Operating profit was JPY -27.7 billion figure. But both of these actually outperformed versus our internal plans, and they outperformed on the back, primarily, of strong ongoing cost reductions and a little bit of a tailwind from the currency. Unfortunately, the outperformance versus our plan at the operating profit level didn't necessarily translate down into the net income level. Our net income clocked in at a JPY 38 billion loss, which is effectively in line with our plan.
The reason why the outperformance from the operating profit didn't flow down is because we chose to impair some of our LCD-related assets. It was a fairly large impairment of JPY 11 billion, and that sort of offset the gains we had at the operating profit level, thus keeping our net loss at the bottom line flat versus plan. Now we will take a look at the three-month standalone quarter for the third quarter. The picture here is that sales came in at JPY 60.5 billion. That was about a 13% fall off of last year. Both EBITDA and operating profit saw strong year-on-year improvements versus last year. They were primarily driven by what I explained earlier in the overview, just tremendous strength in our OLED business, the fact that the OLED had a breakthrough turnaround to profitability, as well as ongoing cost reductions.
Similar to what I had explained for the cumulative earnings, the improvement in the operating line did not translate down to the net income line similarly because of the impairment that we chose to report in this quarter, but also because last year's third quarter had an extraordinary profit reported on the back of an asset sale, and that effectively fell off, dropped off of the report. Because of these two reasons, net income is actually down a little bit, but once again, the core performance of our business, as expressed by the operating profit line, actually saw an improvement. This is in line with what we had explained since the beginning of the year.
We were telling you that a lot of our efforts, in terms of downsizing our unprofitable LCD smartphone business, the fact that we are trying to either shrink or exit out of unprofitable lines of our auto business, all of these efforts, we said, would probably not bear fruit in the first half and would slowly start to manifest and enhance profitability in the second half and beyond. Hopefully, what we are seeing here in the third quarter standalone is the beginning signs of those efforts starting to bear fruit. Next, we are going to look at sales by segment. Again, we are going to start with the nine months cumulative performance for the third quarter. On the top are our core businesses, automotive, smartwatch, and VR, and on the bottom, our non-core businesses, our LCD smartphones. The automotive business sales down a little bit.
I explained, we are sort of shrinking and exiting unprofitable lines, so a little bit of that is coming in there. But smartwatch and VR, up very strong, primarily on the strength of our OLED business, our smartwatch business. Conversely, the LCD smartphone business, down significantly year on year, but that is only to be expected. We are strategically downsizing and eventually exiting this LCD smartphone business, so that is pretty much proceeding as planned. The next slide here is the same thing. It is the sales by segment, but for the three months standalone third quarter. What you are seeing here is that both automotive and smartwatch, and VR, are experiencing an increase in sales. Again, it goes back to what I mentioned two pages earlier.
A lot of the efforts that we are making to strengthen our overall business portfolio profitability will slowly start bearing fruit in the second half of this year and moving forward into next year. What we're seeing here in the standalone third quarter is hopefully a manifestation of that trend. LCD smartphone, exactly as I explained before, we're strategically downsizing and exiting this business, so only expected to see that significant drop right there. The change in operating profit in the form of a waterfall chart. First of all, starting with the nine months cumulative performance for Q3. We explained earlier that the operating losses expanded from the previous year's cumulative third quarter. As you see there, sales were down, so the fall in sales is really what's contributing to the volume line right there.
Mix is down just a little bit. What happened here is that we were expecting to make up for the lost marginal profitability of our LCD smartphone business as we shrink it, with the growth in our VR business. Even though VR business is up year-on-year, it's not nearly as up as much as we had hoped for it to be. Our plans were much, much higher. Unfortunately, we weren't able to make up for, again, the lost marginal profitability as we shrink our smartphone business, and that's what you're seeing a little bit there in the mix line right there. We were able to further reduce fixed costs. You see that line there of an 8.8% upward contribution to operating profit change.
That comes mostly from our production end at our Higashiura Fab, as well as cost reductions at our Mobara Fab, but they unfortunately were not enough to offset the volume and mix decline. Again, year-on-year, on a nine-month cumulative basis, we saw a little bit of an expansion in our operating loss. The picture changes as we've been seeing when we look at the standalone third quarter, which is the first part of our second half. Here, sales are down, and so you see the negative volume contribution. However, mix is up here. The primary driving forces here are, as it says on the slide, number one is that our OLED is progressing really strongly. Our OLED smartwatch is experiencing and seeing very strong growth.
Even though it's not on the slide there, it's actually also contributing to this mix improvement, is our automotive business. Now that we have been working to either shrink or exit some of the unprofitable lines, that's starting to manifest in a mix improvement here. Also in the third quarter, we were able to pass on a little bit of our cost increases onto customers as well. So that's also manifesting in that number you see right there. That, combined with fixed cost reductions and a little bit of reversal of some inventory revaluation effects, meant that we saw a pretty significant improvement in our operating loss from standalone third quarter last year to standalone third quarter this year. That's it for our performance, our earnings results for the third quarter of this year.
Let me just finish off my explanation with an update on our forecast for the full year. I said update, but in fact, we're leaving our forecast for the full year unchanged. As I've been explaining to you thus far, our Q3 numbers were very much in line with plan, and we don't really see much change on the horizon in terms of our fourth quarter. We feel that our full-year plans are still very much achievable, so we're going to be working towards those. The only thing probably worth mentioning is that back in November, when we had our first half earnings results, we explained to you that we had downward revised the sales outlook for our VR business.
We also said in that presentation that we would wait to see how year-end sales of VR proceed, and based on how the year-end sales proceed for VR, we would, if necessary, revise our VR outlook for the year. It turns out that market-wide year-end performance for VR sales were not that strong, and so we feel that the downward revision we made back in November probably still stands as of now. Again, that's another reason why we decided to keep our full-year forecasts as is and unchanged. We're still looking to achieve JPY 247 billion in sales and a JPY 34 billion loss at the operating profit level, and a JPY -44 billion loss at the net income level.
That's all I have in terms of the earnings overview and the earnings results. I'm going to leave it at that. There are a few more pages at the back of the presentation, which are really just sort of, they hash out a lot of the topics that I covered in the overview. The essence of what you see in the latter pages here are effectively more details on the Ishikawa earthquake, the strength of our OLED business, and so forth. I'll leave it for you to read these pages at your leisure if you choose to do so. But for now, I'm going to end my explanation and open up the call to questions if there are any.
If you have a question, please click the raise hand button. We'll unmute you on our end. So when I call your name, go ahead with your question. Anyone has any questions? It seems there are no questions, so we'll wrap up today's briefing. Thank you very much for joining us today.
Thank you all for joining us today. Thanks so much. Bye-bye.