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It is time. So we would like to begin CyberAgent's FY 2023 second quarter earnings briefing. This session is being live streamed. please refer to the disclosure within the earnings document with respect to the content we will share with you today. Our CEO, Fujita, will take us through the performance of this quarter.
I'll take you through the second quarter financial results. This quarter, the first quarter, we had the World Cup, and we had transient increase in cost, but this is the second quarter. So we have gone back to normal -- in terms of sales, we hit a new record high this quarter. And with respect to Uma Musume a big hit, we have been able to wrap up our performance. And with respect to media -- World Cup significantly changed the situation. So ABEMA's losses significantly improved.
And with respect to ads, it has made steady or healthy progress this quarter. And with respect to the games, we saw strong performance due to the anniversaries of major games. This is the consolidated sales. Uma Musume we celebrated the second anniversary this year. And as you can see, so we -- it was a social phenomenon, and we saw a huge peak in sales 2 years ago. And every time we have a great game hit, we -- it tends to gradually come down, and we were a little bit worried, but we have continued to mark steady performance.
With respect to the consolidated OP, -- so in the first quarter, we had a one-off impact. So if we take that away, we have gone back to our healthy levels once again in the second quarter. This is the SG&A expenses. So we used ample advertising costs as well and increase the number of personnel. In April this year, we welcomed 449 new graduates. And so we are now more than 7,000 in terms of head count.
This is the P&L. And here is the balance sheet. There is no major changes here either. With respect to the FY 2023 forecast, OP is a range of JPY 40 billion to JPY 50 billion. In the first quarter, as I mentioned, repeated already, we had one-off increase in costs due to the World Cup. So we were off to a slow start. However, afterwards, we have remained on track. So we have -- we are on track in terms of our performance since the first quarter.
The Internet ad business has been healthy, progressing healthily, and we have marked a new record high sales this quarter. And this is the profit. With respect to the Internet ad business, we have been investing in new areas, numerous new areas. So we have been incurring more cost. So that is why you see the trends here with respect to operating profit. And we are investing in new areas, DX and AI are the major categories, and we are doing reskilling and chat GPT as well. So we are leading the market in investing in these areas, trying to find new business opportunities. And this is the game business. In the second quarter, we have many anniversaries every quarter or every second quarter. So it's the same trend that we're seeing over the last couple of years. But the second quarter, we tend to see a good quarter every year. So our sales are on par with the same quarter previous year. And OP as well is trending as you can see here.
Of all of the major titles that we have, 6 major titles celebrated their anniversary the second quarter. So the situation was very favorable, especially Uma Musume and Granblue Fantasy, those 2 -- these 2 events were very successful.
In 2023, we are going to be releasing these titles. We have Final Fantasy and Jujutsu Kaisen. And it is on par with our expectations right now. So I have great expectations for these 2 new titles. This is the media business. Overall, it has continued to trend upwards and continue to grow. The OP operating loss has improved drastically this quarter. Thanks to the World Cup, this is ABEMA sales and ABEMA and related businesses, but the conditions are very favorable to us, thanks to the work. This is a number of downloads. We've hit 96 million downloads now. We're celebrating our seventh anniversary this year, and we're not going to show this slide going forward because it's going to continue to trend upwards, but we have achieved this many downloads so far.
On the anniversary of our -- on occasion of our anniversary and also -- WAU is also doing very well as well, is 1.5x higher than the previous year. And it is trending up or continuing to trend upward as well. With the streaming of the World Cup, we have on AMD awards as well as other different awards as well.
And so ABEMA's situation has changed significantly. It has become favorable, thanks to the World Cup. The users have started towards ABEMA. They see us differently now and the advertising -- advertisers as well. They want to be on our platform, advertise on our platform, and we have celebrities and stars who want to appear in our content as well. So after the World Cup, we are seeing a great influx of fantastic content. So we believe that overall, the World Cup has been a great success.
This is what ABEMA aspires to become. So -- there are many different live term services available nowadays, but we want to become a TV for the future. So it needs to be free. We believe that it's important to be free. There aren't many competitors who are available for free, so we want to make our service available to anyone. And it's TV, so we want to have sports [indiscernible] margin as well. It's important that we have live streaming of these events. And whether it's drama or Anime, we want to make sure that people are watching these content at the same time. And we want to offer the latest news as well.
We want to continue to offer new content. And we've -- I've said this repeatedly, but we want to free everyone from the constraints of time or place. We want people to be able to watch it on on-demand on any device -- and we believe that this has been communicated well to a wide audience, thanks to the World Cup. And with respect to the media business WINTICKET, it's only been about a year -- 3 years since we began, but we currently have about 40% of the overall shares. We have actually demonstrated our strength in watch and bet -- but we also have ABEMA as well, so we can live stream content. Now we have the technology, our ability to develop our [indiscernible] as well to develop new great services and marketing as well, we believe that we are stronger in the marketing area than any other company. So those are some of the cases that have contributed to this outcome.
This is a mid- to long-term strategy that I mentioned every time. So media and ads are generating a healthy level of our advertising and games are generating a healthy level of performance. And while it's doing that, we want to invest in the media business, ABEMA started in 2015 or '16, sorry. So we started in 2016 with ABEMA. But during this investment period we're already approaching the latter half of the investment period. And we have started to monetize the service. So we have entered the monetization phase for ABEMA already. That's it for myself. Thank you very much.
We would like to conclude CyberAgent's FY 2023 second quarter earnings briefing. If you have any questions, please contact the IR team. Thank you very much for joining us today.