MD&ASeptember 2019 MD&A
GTX’s IP portfolio not only supports the Company’s core product lines by creating barriers of entry to competitors but also underscores the Company’s intrinsic value. During the three quarters ending September 30, 2019 the Company and the Inventergy, LLC signed 12 agreements so far this year, starting with four during the first quarter of 2019, two during the second quarter and six in the third quarter, these twelve non-exclusive license agreements generated approximately $732,000 in top line IP licensing income, a 1852% increase over the comparable period in 2018. As we expand and continue negotiations with other companies, we can expect to sign additional agreements this year, however it is important to note there is no way for us to predict outcomes or timelines. Every company we engage moves at its own pace, has different strategies, legal team, budget, etc. IP licensing is also not our core business, it is a business unit we have been cultivating for years and working with different partners such as Inventergy LLC ( INVT) and several different legal teams across the country, all of which contribute to the process, direction, strategy and final decision making.
In addition to a 215% increase in IP licensing in the third quarter, our B2B business, which represented approximately 33% of our total third quarter revenues had an 50% increase over the comparable period in 2018, our military business also had a slight increase over the same period in 2018, we saw an overall 11% increase in total subscribers with a 37% increase in international subscribers compared to the same period in 2018, however our B2C SmartSole sales saw a slight decline of 8% over the same period in 2018. We did not allocate a lot of resources in B2C advertising or social media promotion this quarter which may have been a contributing factor.
Coming off a very strong second quarter, we took the opportunity to invest in our future, by ramping up our NFC development projects, whereby we are integrating our NFC tags with Blockchain technology and started developing a secured, scalable middleware layer that sits in-between our NFC devices and third-party backend platforms. We are now working with several partners that provide various vertical specific Block chain, IoT and AI backend platforms but needed a secure and seamless flow of data from hardware to backend. We expect to begin pilots of our middleware layer in the coming months and launch in early 2020. This middleware lawyer is industry agnostic and is designed to help drive NFC hardware business and other IoT device sales. We also continued testing our Near Field Communication (NFC) Temperature Trackers, which provide real-time temperature sensing and data logging across the supply chain necessary with transportation of perishables; food, drinks, pharmaceuticals and other temperature sensitive products that can be negatively affected by conditions in transit. This is still a new business silo that has not begun generating revenues but we see this new technology as a natural extension into the world of asset tracking, taking us beyond humans to tracking and monitoring of perishable shipments of food, beverages, biopharmaceuticals, live organs and many other temperature sensitive shipments. In addition to temperature sensing we are now looking into NFC tags that can authenticate products, addressing the multibillion dollar worldwide counterfeit market.