International Isotopes has significantly cut its losses on the back of higher revenue in its latest earnings quarter and through the first nine months of 2018, according to the company’s new 10-Q filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
The new numbers build on the Idaho Falls, Idaho, nuclear medicine specialist’s prior earnings report, which showed year-over-year improvement in the second quarter and first half of 2018.
For the nine months ended Sept. 30, International Isotopes reported a net loss of $501,858. That is only about one-sixth of the $2.9 million loss recorded for the same period of 2017. The third-quarter net loss dropped from nearly $1.6 million last year to $286,768 in 2018.
Meanwhile, sales were up for both reporting periods: from $1.9 million to nearly $2.7 million for the quarter and from just over $5.5 million to nearly $7.9 million over three quarters.
Among its five business lines, the most improvement was in supply of cobalt products, which are used in cancer and brain treatments, industrial operations, and container security scanners at seaports and border crossings. Quarterly sales spiked from $116,750 in 2017 to $1.1 million in 2018, while the nine-month numbers more than quadrupled from $420,816 to over $1.7 million.
It has been five years since International Isotopes has collected any cobalt from the Advanced Test Reactor at the Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory, but the company finally found another supplier. Cobalt from the DOE reactor is anticipated beginning in 2019.
“We are the only company in the U.S. that can provide all these unique services” in cobalt products, the 10-Q says. “There has been a significant increase in regulation by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) in recent years that has created a significant barrier to new entrants into this market.”