Hello, and welcome to the BioSyent Inc. Q3 and 9-month results presentation to September 30, 2023. My name is René Goehrum, and I'm the President and CEO of the company. I want to bring your attention to the disclaimer on forward-looking statements. Of course, you can pause this video and read the details. We'll start the presentation by taking a look at sales on a by-brand and segment basis for the quarter. You can see here that Canadian pharmaceutical sales exceeded CAD 7.4 million, which was up 17% to the year ago. Across the Canadian business, strong performance. We told you when we reported out on Q2 results that we had some pending international pharmaceutical orders that we expected to go out in the third quarter.
They indeed did ship, and you can see here a strong quarter for international pharmaceutical sales and a good result for the Canadian, or rather, I should say, for the legacy business. So in total, sales were just under CAD 8.9 million, up 31% to the year ago. Through 9 months, you can see strong performance again in the Canadian pharmaceutical business. We had no other revenue other than the Q3 revenue for international pharma. So the same number there. And we've had some softness in our legacy business, and that is all really driven by inventory carry-in to some of our Canadian distributors. So an inventory that they had carried into the year, but essentially doesn't become visible to us until they start shipping, and it affected their ordering on a YTD basis.
So how does that all roll through to revenue, EBITDA, and net income after tax? As I said, for the quarter, corporate sales were 31% ahead of the year ago. Our EBITDA was up 49%, reaching CAD 2.9 million, and our net income after tax was just under CAD 2.4 million, up 62%. You may be wondering why there's such a delta between EBITDA and net income. In this case, we have a strong balance sheet with cash, which we do invest in short-term and midterm deposit instruments. And of course, we have to deduct that from our EBITDA calculation. For the quarter itself, our EBITDA margin was strong, certainly against a strong year ago of 29%. We were 33% EBITDA margin.
The net income after tax margin, also strong at 27%, up significantly from the year ago. Looking at the results on a 9-month basis, Canadian pharma is strong, the international pharmaceutical business strong, leading to a 14% growth at just over CAD 23 million through 9 months. We had a slower start in profitability to the year, and you can see this in EBITDA growth on a YTD basis of 7%. So we've made up for the slow start, and we have been investing in launch products. I will be speaking about that in a couple of moments. So despite the significant investment, more investment in selling and marketing expenses that we've been applying against the business, good, strong profit performance. Net income after tax of over CAD 5 million, up 18% to the year ago.
Our YTD net margin equals the year-ago margin, where we were relatively not investing quite as much as we have been this year in launch products. On a per-share basis, we earned CAD 0.20, fully diluted in the quarter. That was our best performance ever, I believe. I don't think we ever got much above CAD 0.15. You see here in Q4 of 2021. Historically, on a trailing twelve months at CAD 0.50 versus forty-nine cents in the year ago. This was our 53rd consecutive profitable quarter. We came profitable at the second quarter of 2010 and have been profitable since then. This chart just illustrates to you kind of what 13 years of profitability look like. We started to earn a profit in 2010.
We had, at bottom of the slide, in the bottom left corner, you can see 14.33 million shares outstanding, fully diluted. We essentially had two products. We had our legacy business, and we had FeraMAX. And now you can see a portfolio that's growing that we think is gonna be a growth driver going into the future, into several years into the future, and a fully diluted share count of just under 12.2 million shares. So we have a couple of highlights for the quarter I want to draw your attention to. So we announced Gelclair, a new product for, oncology supportive care, and, we announced promotion of that commencing in July. We launched Inofolic, a new women's health product for polycystic ovary syndrome. I've got more comments on both Gelclair and Inofolic in a couple of slides.
We paid our fourth consecutive quarterly dividend, and we continued buying back shares, 80,000 of them in the third quarter. Subsequent to the end of the quarter, we launched menopauseinformation.ca. So this is a platform to share key information and content to help women, Canadian women, navigate perimenopause and menopause. It's a really important time, key phase in the life of a woman, and with the assistance of healthcare professionals, we put information that they can use to better educate themselves on menopause and prepare themselves for a meaningful discussion with their healthcare professional. We are just about to start shipping Gelclair, so stay tuned for that information. That'll happen in the fourth quarter, and of course, we've declared our fifth quarterly dividend to be paid in December. A key growth driver for us has been the FeraMAX brand.
It's been the No. 1 recommended oral iron supplement by both pharmacists and physicians across Canada now for eight years running. We don't see that changing based on the feedback that we're getting from our customers. It's become a very trusted brand in the Canadian marketplace, both by the healthcare professionals that I just referenced, but also consumers. Iron is consumed more than 80% by women in Canada. That's 80% of iron that is sold in Canada is consumed by women. So we have a kind of trusted position with both the healthcare professionals and the consumers of FeraMAX. This has provided us a great platform for us to drive a FeraMAX lifecycle strategy and expand our leadership in the Canadian marketplace.
We have been providing tools to healthcare professionals and to Canadian consumers around how to manage their iron health, and we also reformulated the FeraMAX product line that was initiated back in October of 2020. The two existing products were reformulated. We launched a new product this year, FeraMAX 45, and we are in fact developing, well, at least one additional product, and there may be more in the pipeline coming after that. That's probably still a couple of years away. So FeraMAX 45 is designed to maintain iron health. It's not a therapeutic product. It's meant as a once a day and was essentially designed with feedback from healthcare professionals and engagement with iron-consuming patients and women that had experience with what I would describe as iron deficiency or iron deficient anemia relapse. Happens quite often.
Women that are diagnosed as iron deficient are typically not diagnosed as such for the first time. So this product was developed by BioSyent. It, it uses our, our new formulation of the base FeraMAX. It's a chewable, really pleasant-tasting iron product. If you've ever had to taste iron supplements that are on the market, then you'll know that, not surprisingly, they taste like metal. This product is a wonderful way to deliver 45 milligrams of elemental iron in a really great-tasting format, and the product is now available in over 2,000 pharmacies across Canada. That's data as of the end of September, and we do know that that has been growing by the month. In August, we launched Inofolic, and this is a product we in-licensed originally in October of 2020.
We had some work to do to get the label right with Health Canada, and we started shipping it in August this year. This is a product for polycystic ovary syndrome, an endocrine disorder that affects approximately 1.4 million women, some of whom know they have PCOS and many of whom do not know. This fits well with our product portfolio and kind of our focus on women's health. We've had strong feedback, although it's early days, and we have just really started with the product by the time we got to the end of the quarter we're reporting out on here. Also new this year is Gelclair, an oncology supportive care product for relief of oral mucositis. So think of mouth sores and mouth ulcers that are caused by radiation and chemotherapy treatments for various types of cancer.
These sores, oral mucositis, become quite debilitating. They've got a dramatic impact on quality of life, the ability of the patient to eat and to drink, swallow, and even to speak, and in many cases, these patients end up having to discontinue their cancer therapy, or they end up in hospital to get feeding tubes and the like. So Gelclair is a product that's been marketed in other countries around the world for quite some period of time, and it is a gel coating that provides fast relief from pain. So it minimizes or assists with minimizing the amount of analgesic or opioids that are used to manage the pain caused by oral mucositis. And also then allows healing of the mouth, the mucosa to occur.
We expect to start distributing this product here within the next four weeks. Stay tuned for that. These products that I've just mentioned, Inofolic, Gelclair, FeraMAX 45, but also our entire FeraMAX lineup, and then also Tibella, our menopause hormone therapy product, which has experienced strong growth over the last year and a half in Canada, make up the growth drivers for our business, along with the rest of our portfolio. We're on record as saying that our portfolio has a peak penetration value of over CAD 50 million in annual revenue. But of course, when you're not an R&D company, the lifeblood of the future growth of the company is really acquisition and in-licensing. That's an ongoing process, and it never ends.
But we feel that, with these assets in our portfolio now, that, for the next several years, we've got strong growth coming out of our portfolio... So how did operations then kind of translate to our cash position? We generated CAD 6.5 million of cash from operations in the 12 months ending September 30. We deployed CAD 2.7 million in buying back shares, and we have paid dividends, now four quarterly dividends of about CAD 1.9 million. And despite that deployment of capital and investment in increased selling and marketing capacity to launch products, so more sales reps in the field, sales management, tools for sales representatives, samples and communication elements for our existing portfolio and for the new products to drive growth, not just this year, but into the future.
With all of that said, we still grew our cash position to just over CAD 29 million on September thirtieth. Our execution of that strategy has resulted in our return on equity of 18%, just down slightly from last year. We do get asked what our intention is with the cash on hand on the balance sheet. We have a capital-light business model. As I say, we've been profitable for 13 years, and we are investing in growth. We tie our capital allocation to our strategy, so growing our revenue out of the portfolio that we have in existence, deploying additional capital in diversifying our portfolio, whether that be acquisition or in licensing. And yet we find ourselves in a position where cash exceeds requirement to drive our strategy.
About five years ago, in December 2018, we initiated a Normal Course Issuer Bid. We've been consistent in deploying that approach, and we've been buying back shares now for just short of five years. During that period of time, we've repurchased 2.5 million shares and deployed about CAD 16.5 million. Our dividend, including the one that's coming up, it's been declared for payment in December. In aggregate, we've returned just shy of CAD 19 million to shareholders. Our buyback program has increased our earnings on a per-share basis by 21% since we started in 2018. I'd like to finish on this slide just to point out that we have made some changes several years ago in terms of equity incentive compensation for leaders and managers in our business.
We haven't issued any new share options, I believe, in about 4.5 years. We switched to an RSU program, and you might think, well, RSUs could be dilutive, and what we're doing is using our strong balance sheet to buy back shares and hold them in trust. That kind of underscores our commitment to non-dilutive approach to how we manage our cap table. So we hold those shares in trust, and that will take care of our obligation for the RSUs. We've been doing that now for a number of years, and as we've grown our business, our fully dilutive share count has actually been declining and not budging up because of share options. We're quite excited about the growth potential of our portfolio. We've got new brands in the market.
We've got a strong team in the field, and they're getting good feedback from their customers on our products, both our existing and our new, and we look forward to reporting our continued progress to you in the quarters to come. Thank you.