Thank you, Danielle and good morning to all of our current and future listeners! Thank you for attending our call live and thanks also to the larger group who prefer to listen online afterwards.
Today, we'll discuss our third quarter and nine-month 2017 results, along with current business updates. I'm Jess Jankowski and I am joined today by our CFO, Frank Cesario.
It has been a good nine months for your company. Nanophase has posted $9.9 million in revenue and we're on our way to what may be a record year for total revenue. We're also seeing good customer acceptance for some of our Solesence products, including better visibility on commercial launces early in 2018. We continue to refine our business and product development focus to move these products to market as quickly as we can.
I'll cover more of this after Frank discusses our third quarter results in greater detail.
Frank?
Frank Cesario, CFO
Thanks Jess. Good morning. This is Frank Cesario. Before I begin today's overview of our financial results for the third quarter and first nine months of 2017, please remember that all financial results are stated in approximate terms.
Revenue for the third quarter of 2017 was $2.8 million, vs. $2.5 million in 2016. The net loss for the quarter was $0.6 million, or $0.02 per share, for 2017, vs. a net loss of $0.4 million, or $0.01 per share, during 2016.
For the nine months ended September 30, 2017, revenue was $9.9 million as Jess mentioned earlier, vs. $8.4 million during 2016. The net loss for the first nine months of both periods was $0.6 million, or $0.02 per share. Our investments in launching Solesence have been substantial and thus far have been funded by the rest of the business.
We ended the third quarter of 2017 with a $1.1 million cash position and $250,000 drawn on our working capital credit line, which was repaid on October 3rd.
Jess?
Jess Jankowski, President & CEO
Thanks Frank!
It's good to see our revenue grow and good to know that our existing base of customers continues to go strong. The demand for most of our products is solid and the market wants what we make.
In the Personal Care space, the market is demanding more and better solutions, incorporating minerals-based sunscreens, which is good for our ingredients business, our intermediates business and, most importantly, our Solesence business.
As a reminder, Solesence is our wholly owned subsidiary that was created to maximize the value of our patented technology. We believe that we will be able to bring in-demand consumer benefits to market in fully formulated, minerals-based products. Some of these key benefits are:
We have significant externally derived in-vitro and ex-vivo data that support these effects. During 2018, we'll be working on in-vivo clinical data to lock in a consumer claims set that will accelerate adoption by "Brands". These all add up to help Solesence-enabled products provide evidence of "anti-aging" benefits, which are the biggest driver on the consumer demand side.
We often refer to our Customer Product and White Label customers as "Brands". Brands are the companies that will be marketing these products, with their names on them, using their distribution channels, enabled by our Solesence technology, formulating expertise, and regulatory and manufacturing backbone.
For those of you who have yet to see it, I suggest that you go to our new website: www.solesence.com. There are some very viewer-friendly, short, marketing videos worth watching, as well as an abundance of meaningful product information. While we're not selling products to consumers, we're helping Brands to produce products that capitalize on what the market is demanding. We help them to tell a compelling story about their products, enabled by Solesence, that will help the Brand win in the marketplace. Our goal is to have a few Custom or White Label products scaling up by the end of this year for launches in 2018. We expect to get some small amounts of revenue relating to this in Q4. We also expect our first Solesence-enabled products to hit the market in April 2018.
We're continuing to invest in this next wave of growth, right now.
Also, on this call, I wanted to give you a quick update on where we currently stand with our Polishing Business. We announced a new relationship between Nanophase and Eminess Technologies in June of this year. This was done in keeping with our strategy to streamline the business AND reduce our sales and technical support load in the Polishing Market, allowing us to bring more product and business-development resources to bear on fewer, faster growing business areas.
I attended Optifab 2017 in New York last week and am happy to report that Nanophase and Eminess are working well together and expect a smooth transition in the selling and marketing interface. So far, our customer base has been happy with the change, with positive feedback coming from everyone I have spoken with. We believe that this arrangement will ultimately lead to higher customer satisfaction and an expansion of both company's market footprints.
Moving on, I also want to give all of you an update on our Solar Control business. Given some changing market and internal customer factors, we don't expect any scale-ups to begin in 2017 and we're not clear on 2018 yet. We have developed several products that have been well-received, but we need to continue to iterate in these areas, with these and other customers, to win here. This would require a significant enhancement in our business an product-development activities.
At this point, given the steady positive feedback we're getting from our work with Solesence, I've decided to reduce our focus on developing new products in Solar Control for the near term. The quantity of iterations that are required in this market, coupled with the smaller universe of companies that we can target, have lead me to believe that we'll get a much better payback from our ongoing Solesence development work. We still have an expectation that Solar Control could be a significant revenue driver for Nanophase in the future, but given our existing resource limitations, coupled with the consistent positive feedback we keep getting from the anti-aging and beauty science Brands, we have prioritized Solesence over Solar Control for now.
Although most of our investors listen to the webcast, or review the transcript after the live call, I'd like to invite those participating in today's call to ask any questions you may have, or to share your comments.
Danielle, would you please begin the Q&A session?
Q&A SESSION
Thank you, Danielle. Thank you also to all of you who have taken the time to listen and to support Nanophase and Solesence.
We're all focused on new business growth, revenue growth and cash generation. We're focused this way in order to build our enterprise value in a faster sustained way, from which all of our stakeholders will be able to profit.
We're looking forward to our next opportunity to discuss the business with you in a few months.
I hope that all of you have a good and productive day!