Mera Pharmaceuticals loses $1.3M as revenue dives

Mera Pharmaceuticals Inc., which announced in January it was reorganizing into two units, posted a wider loss in fiscal 2005 than a year earlier as revenue plunged 57.3 percent.

The Kona-based producer of nutritional supplements from microalgae lost $1.3 million, nearly zero cents a share, in the year ended Oct. 31, 2005, according to a filing yesterday with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Mera, formerly known as Aquasearch Inc. before emerging from bankruptcy in 2002, lost $1.1 million, or nearly zero cents a share, in fiscal 2004.

Mera did not break out its fiscal fourth-quarter numbers in its filing.

Revenue fell to $387,972 in fiscal 2005 from $909,613 a year earlier as product sales fell 57 percent to $288,871 from $672,204 in 2004. Included among the product sales of 2004 was $200,000 of previously deferred revenue that had been received from Chinese businessmen for now-expired products. The businessmen never received government approval to import the products. Excluding that deferred revenue, product revenue fell about 39 percent year over year because of a decline in orders from Mera's wholesale distributors.

Mera said last month it had reorganized the company internally into a research division that will try to develop new products and a consumer products division that will oversee sales and marketing of a line of dietary supplements that Mera already is producing.