Thank you for waiting. We will now begin the investor meeting for the Third Quarter of the Fiscal Year 2026, hosted by SoftBank Corp. Let me start by introducing today's speakers. Mr. Fujihara, Director, Executive Vice President, and CFO SoftBank Corp. Mr. Akiyama, Vice President, Head of Finance Unit. Mr. Onoguchi, Head of the Finance and Accounting Division, Finance Unit. Mr. Sasaki, Senior Director, Financial AI Promotion Office, Finance Unit. Today's meeting is also being streamed live online. Thank you for tuning in. Now, Mr. Fujihara will provide an overview of SoftBank's consolidated financial results.
We announced the financial results earlier today, and I'd like to share with you more in detail about our financial performance. Once again, thank you very much for coming despite busy schedule. This is the executive summary. Revenue increased in all segments, and it hit record high. Revenue and profit increased. Accordingly, we revised the full-year forecast for fiscal year 2025. We want to give an update, especially because of the impact from ASKUL. Operating income in financial segment doubled, and we received high external ESG ratings. Okay, let me go into this. Result for the third quarter: revenue and profit increased. Steady progressed toward full-year forecast for all segments, especially operating income 88.4% and net income 89.9%. We see a high progress rate toward the full-year forecast.
Let me give you a breakdown. Revenue increased by 8%, was JPY 383 billion. Progress toward the full-year forecast of JPY 6.7 trillion was 77.5%. Financial and distribution achieved a more than 20% increase. For media. Excluding ASKUL's third-quarter revenue decline of JPY 63 billion, media represented an increase of 6.7%. So modest contribution was there. Now, EBITDA. Again, we see steady growth, and we hit the record high. Compared to last year, we saw an increase of JPY 52 billion or +3.8%. Progress toward the full-year forecast is over 80%.
Excluding media and EC, four segments contributed a lot. Due to ASKUL's impact, media EC presents those numbers in terms of ASKUL. Next, operating income. We increased at JPY 62.3 billion or 7.6%. Progress toward the full-year forecast was 88.4%. Again, steady growth. Especially in the finance sector, we saw double growth. Each segment gave us a contribution, but media EC declined by 2.5% or JPY 5 billion because of the negative impact of ASKUL, which was JPY 98.9 billion. Excluding that, however, we would have seen an increase of 7%.
Now, by the segment consumer, mobile revenue continued to grow, and the revenue increased by JPY 72.2 billion or 3.3%. Sales of goods and others increased significantly by JPY 73.2 billion or 14.2%. Unit price of mobile devices increased significantly, and the number of mobile devices also increased, resulting in substantial revenue growth. Electricity, because of diminished trading transactions, saw revenue decrease. Broadband saw a continuous increase in subscribers. Mobile recorded JPY 26 billion, thanks to subscriber growth and improvement of ARPU. And mobile revenue. We had a lot of questions about acquisition and others earlier today, but we want to grow both in revenue and profit. So we continuously want to focus on increasing the top line. The consumer segment, waterfall chart.
Excluding cost of goods and services, gross profit was JPY 37 billion, and expenses increased by JPY 36 billion, and acquisition costs increased by JPY 13.6 billion because of the increase of amortization. Promotion expenses increased mainly due to the more cost to support the device purchase program. As for electricity, revenue down, but cost of electricity services improved by JPY 35 billion. Broadband saw a JPY 7.4 billion increase. Depreciation and others. Net-net, JPY 3.2 billion. Mobile increased by JPY 26 billion. 278 too. So that's how it constitutes 6% of profit. Next, enterprise segment. Revenue and profit increased, steady growth. Revenue grew by 8.8% or JPY 59 billion. Especially solutions were good, which posted a 13.1% growth, and we continue focusing on double-digit growth in this area. As for segment income, we saw an increase of JPY 17.7 billion or 12.6%. Again, double-digit growth is our commitment.
Progress to the full-year forecast is 84.1%. So enterprise continues to be driving forth for future growth. Business solutions and other revenue, especially recurring revenue, posted an 11% increase. Media and EC segment. System outage by a ransomware attack at ASKUL posed a negative impact. In commerce, we saw a loss of JPY 9.6 billion, which is mainly due to ASKUL's third-quarter impact. But excluding that, we saw modest growth. Media posted a slight growth in revenue. Strategy, thanks to M&A, we saw a steady growth. Segment income is shown on the right-hand side. Overall, we saw a decline by JPY 5 billion or 2.5% year-on-year. There was some valuation gain from restructuring, which was a one-time impact. And ASKUL. Details were already disclosed by LINE Yahoo , so I'm not going to go into detail here. Next, finance segment. Revenue expanded steadily.
Increase of JPY 56.9 billion was 23.9%. PayPay posted double-digit growth. Income contributed JPY 32 billion, and that resulted in JPY 66 billion of segment income. Distribution segment and others. Again, we see steady growth and increased JPY 157 billion or 25.6% year-on-year. Income increased by JPY 7 billion or 29.2%. Progress toward the full-year forecast was 96.3%. Others, operating income. In the third quarter, we increased R&D investment by JPY 19 billion. Subsidiaries posted promotion expenses in the third quarter, but it's been recovering. For the full year, we should be able to show you a positive number. Net income. Thanks to the increase in operating income, overall, we saw an increase of JPY 48.9 billion or 11.2% year-on-year. Progress toward the full-year forecast was 89.9%. Other than operating income, financial income and loss, thanks to LY, was JPY 15.7 billion.
Absence of valuation loss of put options for equity methods associated in the previous year. Profit from sales of shares in Remember & Company. That was last year's one-time event. Tax effects relating to PayPay were also there. SoftBank, absence of deferred tax impact from business restructuring in the previous year, we saw improvement in income taxes. CapEx. Almost on plan. Consumer enterprise. This year's guidance was JPY 34 billion and progress toward that full-year forecast is 67.3%. AI. So decreased by JPY 10 billion. IFRS 16 impact. Increased due to the signing of lease contracts for data centers. AI computing will be described later in the slides. Since purchasing Sakai, including Tomakomai partly, also AI computing infrastructure. You can see as of now, at the right button, total is JPY 257 billion.
We are going to do the acceptance of the JPY 200 billion, and the payment is JPY 190 billion. So this is funded by Bond-type Class Shares for the next mid- and long-term business management plan. And how we are going to manage is we are now in the discussion. We would like to announce in the next presentation regarding primary free cash flow. So as for the cash flow generation is our big target. So it has a steady progress. And operating cash flow increased in EBITDA and investment cash flow also increased. As for the long-term growth investments are funded. And idea, different things. So we have continued with the same reconciliation. So free cash flow and net leverage ratio are our focus. So let me explain about the net leverage ratio. First, left side, interest-bearing debt is 3.07 compared to the previous year.
It's 0.12 increased year-over-year. This is increased by JPY 120 billion year-over-year. As you can see, for the Net Leverage Ratio, it's almost flattish. Here's the balance sheet. Our balance sheet, please pay attention to. It's JPY 18.2 trillion compared to the last fiscal year-end. It is increased by JPY 1.9 trillion. This is due to the financial business expansion, including M&A. As you can see, the equity attributable to owners of the company and equity, this one shows JPY 211.6 billion year-over-year. Over seven years, it has grown just greatly. When you look at equity, and since we do have dividend payout compared, it is good to see year-over-year compared to the previous year. It has increased by almost JPY 200 billion. From here, I would like to explain about KPI. First, telecom.
Mobile subscribers grew by 0.69 million by 2.2%. Just before listing, it was 2.46 million. So it has increased by 15 million or so. So looking at the right-side churn rate, due to the electricity churn rate, so it has increased to 1.45%. 0.15% year-on-year. So we hope that we can announce improvement of the result in the next quarter. So next one is the net additions. And Mr. Miyakawa mentioned in the previous presentation, so net losses were recorded. And this corporate change would also lead as we focus on the increased revenue and income. So next, ARPU. Year-on-year, it's minus JPY 10. So on the right side shows, it was minus JPY 30. Now it's minus JPY 10. When we look at consumer, so it's turning to positive. So including enterprise, it still shows minus. However, our forecast was minus JPY 30 full year.
At the end of the term. Full year forecast of -30, we would like to maintain this. Next, electricity broadband. Compared to last year, it increased by 0.1 million. Electricity is shifting the acquisition effort. It is improving gradually. Media and EC. Both EC transaction value and group total advertising revenue expanded. Next, PayPay. Users increased steadily. The number of users exceeded 70,000. The MAU also exceeded 40 million. The number of payments increased by 18.5%. Number of payments significantly outpaced the user growth. It means that the rise in payments per person. Next, GMV. This also is going steadily and increased at 23.7%. Since the number of payments was 18.5% increase, all the businesses are increasing in every manner.
Next is t he PayPay Bank's deposit and loan balances also showed steady growth. So as for PayPay revenue, it increased by 26.3%. Right side shows EBITDA, shows great increase. So we are looking forward to its further growth. SB Payment Service. So this business is growing steadily. And the non-telecom area is growing as we make strategy. And next is about ESG topics. So we were recognized as a prime seed company this year as well. Also in other areas, we have received a very high rating. Please take a look at this slide for the details. Next, I would like to explain about our upward revision of full-year forecast. This is the summary from revenue to net income. All of them we revised upwardly. Revenue. All segments contributed, excluding impact from system outage at ASKUL.
So we were at the pace of exceeding JPY 7 trillion due to the system outage at ASKUL. So we revised the variance by JPY 250 billion for revenue. As for EBITDA, mainly due to distribution and improvement in R&D and other costs. Operating income, I will explain in detail later. Net income, mainly due to the upward revision of operating income and so on. This is the details of the operating income. Upfront investment and R&D expenses were the major reasons. This concludes my presentation. Now we would like to move on to the Q&A session. Thank you.
Now we will move on to the Q&A session. We will start by taking questions from the audience here in the venue, followed by participants joining us via Zoom. For those attending via Zoom, please access the meeting using the method we shared in advance and click the raise hand button if you wish to ask a question. After joining via Zoom, kindly turn off the live stream from other websites to avoid audio feedback. In order to take as many questions as possible, we ask each participant to limit their questions to two per person.
Tokunaga from Daiwa Securities. Today is the last investor briefing for Fujihara-san. I just want to say thank you, Fujihara-san. With that, I have two questions. I want to hear from Fujihara-san and the new CFO, Akiyama-san. Fujihara-san, what's your expectation for next-generation SoftBank? And second, Akiyama-san, do you have any resolution that you want to share with us?
So I'm going to ask Akiyama-san to give you a few words. Lastly, from myself, Fujihara, I said goodbye at the end of earnings result announcement earlier. The SoftBank increased both in revenue and profit. We hit the milestone of JPY 10 trillion. We are ready for our next leap. Talking about AI, in the last 10, 20 years, we have been transforming ourselves. AI will bring us even greater changes. I think AI will determine the next 10 years of SoftBank. So again, I have high expectations from the new leadership team. Whatever I can help, I will do my best.
Thank you, Fujihara-san. Second question. More in short term. Looking at the plan for operating income fourth quarter, Consumer expected a little bit of loss. The Other segment also a loss. I think Others are expected to lose money in the fourth quarter. So consumer would lose profit a little bit. And also you expect others to suffer from revenue loss. Well, consumer, we are working on restructuring. And whatever we can do by the end of this fiscal year, we will try to implement. And JPY 150 billion by this year is definitely possible. And the other segment, there are a lot of uncertainties, including ASKUL's potential lingering impact. So others and investment may seem big numbers, but we have some buffer included to get ready for next year. The consumer's preparation in terms of preparation, consumer, in which area you prepare for? Network, marketing expenses, or what?
This is not a thing specific, but in general, we want to get ready. When it comes to acquisition cost, for example, if we can spend the cost efficiently, we wouldn't mind spending acquisition cost. We just want to make sure that our plan is doable.
Thank you. Next, Masuno from Nomura Securities. Please unmute and ask your questions. Thank you.
Sorry, my microphone setting previously was wrong. First of all, Mr. Fujihara, thank you so much for all your contribution. Even after your retirement, you will be staying in a certain position. So I'm looking forward to still communicating with you. So my question, the earnings results of the midterm last September, already you. So after September to December, over that three months, how did you change the direction? Since the churn rate increased, you drastically changed the direction. So you made quite a drastic change. So what made you do so?
Since September, we've started looking ahead. In the third quarter, we started shifting our direction. Acquisition cost and lifetime value, the balance between these two, actually, it does not really make sense. We objectively reviewed the situation to shift our direction. As for the consumer segment, it's been stable, the business. Therefore, our approach, we changed our approach, including the acquisition as well. We need to continue brushing up towards the next fiscal year as well. The churn rate, 1.38, the churn rate in the third quarter, it could have exceeded even 1.4%. Just by looking at the churn rate, the figure itself, it could have even exceeded further.
What happened within SoftBank? eSIM users canceled in a very short term. Is there anything unique? What is the countermeasure that you have?
Going back to the last second half of the last year, our acquisition was doing well with the good net additions. Those users, cancellation actually appeared more clearly in this quarter. So far, our acquisition was doing really well. So therefore, it showed quite a big negative figure. So our intention is to take actions when we see the challenges. So that's why we decided to shift our direction to this.
So those who purchased a number of lines and those who have a very short-term contract, so it was the bottleneck. So what did you actually change?
So we made it more strict for those potential users. And so we reviewed our policies.
Thank you.
Next, Kikuchi-san, SMBC Nikko Securities.
You confidently explained the reasons behind net loss. From my perspective, it was amazing. Like Masuno-san earlier asked you, ARPU is not really going steadily. And you see increase in churn. In the fourth quarter, well, even though you revised your forecast a little bit, still very small upgrade. So again, in the fourth quarter, are there any reasons why you have to cost? Or you just operate a business in a very healthy manner? Or there are any things that you may have to cost a lot in the fourth quarter? So again, to me, your upward revision was still very small.
Yes, a slight increase, that's for sure. So maybe it's too small to call it upward revision. But on the other hand, ASKUL's impact needs to be absorbed to share with you. Updated forecast. So that's how it happened. Upward revision is rather conservative. In other words, we are having our business under control. And Fujihara-san, I have trusted you a lot. So I always wonder how you operate as CFO while looking at potential dividend and looking at investment. But in the next mid-long-term plan, you may want to aggressively invest. And you may want to aggressively return to shareholders. So it sounds like a very stretchy, stretchy financial operation you may have to do going forward.
So Fujihara-san, what's your view while you are retiring? I don't expect you to say anything at this moment. But I wonder if you have any concerns before you retire.
We have had very healthy, productive discussions internally with the senior management team, including CEO. Shareholder return and growth, we want to achieve both. And this remains the same. As for shareholder return, dividend ratio may look a little bit high. But in the inflationary environment, we have kept the dividend ratio same. So we want to be comfortable and confident before sharing our view with you. Net leverage ratio and free cash flows are very important from a CFA perspective. In fact, my successor, Akiyama-san, has been looking at them for a long time in the finance team. He has good knowledge, cash flow, and net leverage ratio. The growth strategy and investment, we have been again discussing internally to make sure that we can present a very responsible performance.
Thank you.
Are there anyone who have questions? Please do so. Raise your hand or press raise your hand button. Masuno-san from Nomura Securities.
I would like to take this opportunity to ask you one more question about investment for the next fiscal year. You mentioned that you did not include the investment for Sakai Data Center as well as for the GPUs. So the depreciation for data center is quite long. But for GPUs, it's usually a five-year depreciation. So it would impact. So with the Sovereign Cloud together with Oracle, you're going to prepare a large cloud. And I believe that you need to have your own GPU as an asset. So especially for Sovereign Cloud, the cash-out plan for AI, particularly for next fiscal year, what is your view? And overall, primary cash flow and the upfront investment for midterm plan for free cash flow, primary free cash flow, including dividend. And for the rate, we will make sure to handle properly. And for the investment for midterm, mid-long-term, so what is the return?
So we need to also show that clearly. So how we are going to take it back, then we need to also make a proper decision. For the next mid-long-term business management plan, what kind of businesses we would like to plan and establish needs to be well considered. That will be our core discussion moving forward. As President and CEO Miyakawa also mentioned in the presentation, he mentioned that for you to kindly wait until our next midterm and long-term management plan presentation. Just for follow-up, in four to six years, there will be more and more return for the investment. But looking at the four to six years, normally first year or second year, it will be the upfront investment. And fifth or final year, and it will be the one that you get a return. That's how it normally works for the upfront investment and the return.
The details are still in consideration. We would like to give you a more clear answer to that question in our next presentation or briefing. So we have accumulated our plan. And also the funding is quite stable compared to before. So therefore, we should be able to, once we can establish the good return base, so we have more and more options for our business strategies. So therefore, how we would like to draw a map for the mid- and long-term management plan. And we do also understand your concerns. So we would like to also take concern. Thank you.
That concludes SoftBank Corp's investor meeting for the fiscal year 2026 third quarter. Last but not the least, we're going to introduce the successor of Fujihara, Mr. Akiyama.
First of all, thank you very much for your continued support for a long time. And I really appreciate that. My successor is sitting next to me, Mr. Akiyama, as the head of finance unit. I think he is ready for taking over my role. So I'm going to ask Akiyama-san to give you a few words.
I am going to take over Fujihara-san's role as CFO. Let me briefly introduce myself. I joined SoftBank from Japan Telecom. Most of my career was spent in finance. In 2018, when we listed, and since then, I have been engaged in fundraising and making plans of capital and finance to make sure that we can achieve both growth and shareholder return. For the last 12 months under Fujihara-san's leadership, I have been looking over what Fujihara-san does or does. I'm going to take much more bigger responsibility going forward. Again, I want to still make sure that we can both achieve growth and return.
And through that, I would like to help growing corporate value. As Miyakawa-sa n indicated earlier today, the senior management team will be much younger. In May, we're going to announce the latter half of the mid-long-term plan. I hope that you will expect a lot from that. Fujihara-san has given me very warm words. I myself want to meet his expectations and your expectations. Once again, thank you very much for joining us today. I appreciate your continued support. Thank you.
This concludes the investor meeting for the third quarter of fiscal year 2026. A recorded version of today's presentation will be made available on demand on our corporate website. Please feel free to view it at your convenience. Once again, thank you very much for coming to our investor meeting despite your very busy schedule.