A spokesperson for the company said that it has successfully produced a 1kg batch of green cadmium-free quantum dots for a large Japanese firm.

Nanoco employees 60 at its base and production facility in Runcorn, and supplied a 1kg batch of red quantum dots to the same company last year, also for the healthy sum of £1.2m.

Production of the green dots is another technical achievement by Nanoco, as green dots are more challenging to manufacture than red ones due to their smaller size.

The Japanese corporation is planning on developing a range of LED applications that incorporate Nanoco’s red and green quantum dots including the backlighting of LCD displays and LED-based general lighting.

Michael Edelman, Nanoco’s chief executive, said:  “It is the first time that we have produced green quantum dots on this scale, marking a particular technical achievement as green dots are just a few nanometers in diameter – about half the size of red ones.

“We now look to forward to the customer progressing to the launch of quantum dot LEDs, and to our on-going supply of quantum dots,” he added.