Material costs generally stabilized. Going forward, for both fourth quarter 2023 and full-year 2024, nominal inflationary increases are expected, particularly for labor costs. We expect to maintain our strong price-to-cost ratio as we ship our higher-priced backlog. Overall, we believe our average unit margins will improve in the fourth quarter of 2023 over the prior year and remain at sound levels throughout 2024. Anticipated increases in labor and overhead costs are projected to erode the favorable price-to-cost ratio over the course of 2024. This is expected to result in modestly lower gross margins, compared with 2023. We continue to monitor labor and material costs closely, as well as the impact of tariffs and competition, and we’ll adjust forward pricing accordingly.
Before I turn the call over to Scott, I’ll comment on our working capital levels and cash flow. We continue to focus on reducing working capital, especially our inventory levels. We made more progress during the quarter, but inventory levels remain higher than we would like largely due to the production challenges I mentioned earlier. We’ll continue to focus on ensuring an efficient and consistent flow of materials so we can build more units while optimizing our on-hand inventory. These actions should lead to a reduction in overall raw material inventory. Intermittent supply and labor constraints can [Technical Difficulty] isolated production shortfalls and increased inventory, but we have made significant progress in reducing these issues.
We expect continued improvement in fourth quarter of 2023 and throughout 2024. We’re also working closely with our dealer partners to balance order and delivery timing with their customers’ needs. We are committed to increasing our cash flow and deploying it accretively over time. It’s important to me, it’s important to our Board and is a primary focus of our CFO. Over to you, Scott.
Scott Minder: Thanks, Rajiv. As you just heard, our positive year-over-year revenue and earnings growth trends continued in the third quarter. The business generated significantly improved financial results that were ahead of our expectations. Once again, quarterly revenues topped $1 billion, increasing 19% or [Technical Difficulty]. Revenue growth was led by a 19% increase in our Lift Truck business, which significantly outpaced the 5% shipment growth rate over the same period. This difference was largely due to a parts volume increase and the benefit from prior price increases in all regions. Favorable sales mix toward higher-priced, higher-capacity trucks and foreign currency benefits added to the top line growth. Shipments in the EMEA and JAPIC regions were lower.
Our manufacturing and supply chain teams continued their work on increasing production rates and unit shipments. We shipped 25,700 units in the third quarter, increasing by 5% compared to prior year but declining sequentially. This quarter-over-quarter decrease was in line with expectations due to seasonal plant shutdowns in Q3. Third quarter unit bookings were 18,200, decreasing 12% year-over-year and 15% sequentially. These declines resulted from slowing, but healthy markets in our major geographies. As a result of the higher production rates and lower bookings, our backlog declined to 85,300 units. This favorable decrease improves lead times on some of our product lines. As Rajiv noted earlier, lead times are still long with some extending beyond 12 months.
Moving to earnings. We reported consolidated operating profit of nearly $59 million, representing a 5.9% margin in the third quarter. This was an improvement of almost $84 million, compared to a 2022 loss. Our substantial year-over-year operating profit improvement outpaced revenue growth for the quarter, resulting in a 52% incremental margin. Q3 net income was $36 million or $2.06 per share. This compares to a prior year net loss. Over the past 12 months, our team has worked hard to overcome the significant headwinds from the pandemic period. We’ve generated net income of $108 million over four straight profitable quarters to a level not achieved since 2014. What a difference a year can make. Now I’ll cover our individual business results for some additional color.
