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Nanophase Technologies Corporation What is the market strategy of Nanotechnology during the time of the case? Nanophase Technologies is an industry-leading nanocrystalline materials innovator and manufacturer with an integrated family of nanomaterial technologies. Its market strategy can be explained as under: Target market: Even though Nanophase started as a research and development unit and its major revenues came from government research contracts, it transited itself from an R & D unit to a commercial enterprise. Thus, its target market were the businesses which were involved in manufacturing and production of products in diverse processes like personal care, sunscreens, abrasion-resistant applications, environmental catalysts, antimicrobial products, and a variety of polishing applications, including semiconductors, hard disk drives, and optics. Out of these the largest product market for Nanophase was zinc-oxide powder, which is used as an inorganic ingredient in sunscreen, cosmetic and other health care products produced by the BASF cosmetic chemicals group. Sales to BASF cosmetic chemical group accounted for 75.5% of Nanophase’s revenue. Besides this, Zinc-oxide is also used as an ingredient in Dr. Scholl’s foot spray to act as a fungicide and prevent the nozzle from clogging. The company expects the market potential for its products in this sector (health care and cosmetics) to be about $45million. Product: Nanophase makes use of nanotechnology to produce nanocrystalline particles in powder form using metallic materials such as aluminum, cerium, copper, iron and zinc. The two of the most important technologies Nanophase uses are Physical Vapor Synthesis (PVS) and Discrete Particle Encapsulation (DPE). It is because of the PVS process that Nanophase is able to produce nanoparticles with properties that are highly desirable to customers. These properties help the product create features like spherical, nonporous particles of uniform size and large surface area, particles virtually free of chemical residues and particles that flow freely without clustering together. The DPE process provides nanoparticles specific characteristics such as preventing the particles from sticking together or enabling them to be dispersed in a fluid or polymer to meet the specific customer needs. Besides this, the company also uses the PVS process and the NanoArc Synthesis ™ to custom-size the particles for a customer’s application.
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