If retailers or others deploying RAIN fail to realize demonstrable benefits from RAIN or delay or abandon their deployments, overall RAIN market acceptance may be materially and adversely affected. For example, in the second half of 2017 and early 2018, the pace of growth in endpoint IC unit-volume shipments decreased relative to 2016, which we believe was due to multiple factors including, but not limited to, delays in new deployments and in planned expansions at several large retailers. Moreover, retailers that have a primarily physical presence in the marketplace have experienced financial stress in recent periods. Many of these retailers have deployed RAIN to improve competitiveness; however, if they fail to compete effectively, the number of stores they maintain, and thus the scope of their RAIN deployments, may decrease significantly. In addition, uncertainties caused by possible imposition of tariffs may cause retailers to change their supply chain and slow RAIN adoption as a consequence. Any widespread delay, slowdown or failure by retailers or other organizations to implement RAIN-based systems generally, and our products and platform specifically, will materially and adversely affect our business, operating results, financial condition and long-term prospects.
If we are unsuccessful in fostering meaningful adoption of our products and platform by end users other than retailers, our business prospects may be adversely affected.
We expect end users to deploy our platform in sectors beyond retail, including, for example in supply chain, aviation and healthcare. If we fail to make our products and platform aneasy-to-deploy, economical solution for use cases in these other sectors, our ability to penetrate them may suffer and our business prospects may be adversely affected.
We have a history of losses and have only achieved profitability intermittently. We cannot be certain that we will increase or sustain profitability in the future.
We have incurred losses since our inception in 2000. While we were profitable between 2013 and 2015, we had a net loss of $15.3 million for the nine months ended September 30, 2019 and an accumulated deficit of $255.1 million as of September 30, 2019. Our ability to regain or sustain profitability depends on numerous factors, many of which are out of our control, including continued RAIN adoption and our market share. We expect significant expenditures to support operations, product development, and business and headcount expansion in sales, engineering, and marketing as a public company. If we fail to increase our revenue or manage our expenses, we may not increase or sustain profitability in the future.
Fluctuations in our quarterly and annual operating results may adversely affect our business, prospects and stock price.
You must consider our business and prospects in light of the risks and difficulties we encounter in the uncertain and rapidly evolving RAIN market. Because this market is new and evolving, predicting its future growth rate and size is difficult. The rapidly evolving nature of the markets in which we sell our products, as well as other factors that are beyond our control, reduce our ability to accurately evaluate our future prospects and forecast quarterly or annual performance.
End users drive demand for our products. Because we sell nearly all of our products through channel partners, our ability to determine and forecastend-user demand is limited.
For example, our 2016 endpoint IC sales exceeded both our expectations and those of our industry’s analysts due in large part to several coincident large-scale deployments. However, in portions of 2017 and 2018, the pace of growth in endpoint IC unit-volume shipments decreased relative to 2016, which we believe was due to multiple factors including, but not limited to, delays in new deployments and in planned expansions at several large retailers as well as an endpoint IC channel-inventory correction.
Forecastingend-user demand for other elements of RAIN solutions is also difficult. We rely on our channel partners to integrate our RAIN-based systems products withend-user information systems and this integration has been uneven and unpredictable in scope, timing and implementation. Also, RAIN-based systems in general often involve time-consumingproofs-of-concepts and other time-consuming steps such as designing and implementing new business processes, which make sales of our system products difficult to forecast. Partly as a consequence, in the past, both we and other industry participants have at times overestimated the RAIN market size and growth rates, then failed to meet expectations.