January 3, 2022 Cannabis Daily Transcript
Good morning my name is Jay Rosenthal and I’m the Managing Director of Business of Cannabis.
Today, we launch this channel officially – so welcome to the Business of Cannabis on YouTube.
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For those new to to Business of Cannabis: Since 2017 – we’ve highlighted the companies, brands, people and trends driving the cannabis industry – and that’s what we look to do here, everyday.
Everyday we’ll run down the key cannabis news stories we’re following, then transition to a cannabis conversation with a cannabis newsmaker – in our BofC Live segment. Sometimes those will be live – other times they may be segments from our cannabis events or other programs within Business of Cannabis.
We’re starting today – so welcome.
We’d love to hear from you in the comments. And always feel free to visit us at businessofcannabis.com as well as through all the social channels – Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram.
First, our stories we’re following at Cannabis Daily and we’ll follow up that with a conversation with our resident cannabis retail expert – Krista Raymer.
For today’s stories,
- Trulieve’s CEO makes some news
- More cannabis M&A in 2022
- Hemp could benefit from focus on environment
- 2021 was a milestone year for European cannabis
First story… Trulieve’s CEO goes Yahoo!
In an appearance on Yahoo Finance Live, the CEO of Florida-based MSO Trulieve Kim Rivers said that the industry will continue to grow within states — whether federal reform comes in 2022 or not.
For those new to this: Trulieve went public in Sept. 2018 and has grown by 225%. For the first nine months of 2021 they saw a 79% top line growth year-over-year compared to 2020.
Rivers also called on Congress to act on the American peoples’ will to legalize cannabis, but also noted that the industry is growing by leaps and bounds even without federal legalization.
Next up… is the M&A train just getting started?
There were 306 cannabis M&A transactions in 2021, said New York’s Viridian Capital Advisors. That’s three times as much action in 2020, according to a report by MJBizDaily.
2021’s biggest deals
- Jazz Pharmaceuticals → GW Pharma ($7.2 billion)
- Trulieve → Harvest Health ($2.1 billion)
- PharmaCann → LivWell (undisclosed)
- Hexo → Redecan ($766 million)
- TerrAscend → Gage Cannabis ($545 million)
What else?
Lower interest costs and pressure to grow could mean even more M&A will come in 2022.
Some recent trends to watch:
- Entrance into new and emerging adult-use markets (eg., Green Thumb’s recent acquisition of Minnesotas’s LeafLine Industries),
- MSOs snapping up some outdoor-cultivators in California,
- Canadian LP looking to grow their US presence and
- emerging hemp companies in Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee.
For our third story… hemps role in solving the climate crisis
Carbon caps and plastics bans could drive demand for hemp products like building blocks, clothes and more, according to a report by Bloomberg.
But…
Hemp has had some headwinds: The number of acres planted for hemp shrank from 70,530 in 2020 to 33,844 in 2021, the US FDA currently does not regulate CBD, and right now, hemp is more expensive to produce than petrochemicals in plastics.
The takeaway
Here’s an indicator: Merida Capital Partners will grow its investment in industrial hemp companies, such as Canadian Rockies Hemp Corp. and Bast Fibre Technologies Inc because, they say: “Industrial hemp is the biggest opportunity in the cannabis sector as a whole,”
And our last story today… to the EU
2021 was a big year for Europe’s cannabis industry, reports BusinessCann. Some of the major milestones (and what’s to come in 2022):
- Germany gave the green light to an adult-use cannabis market
- Malta becomes the first European country to legalize adult-use cannabis
- Switzerland and the Netherlands will “launch their own adult-use trials” and momentum is growing in Luxembourg, Portugal and Italy
- Expanding medical cannabis to 20 countries, including Ireland and France
What’s still to come
- Clearing the many roadblocks to CBD, such as the UK’s compliant list, novel foods and the status of cannabidiol
- Increased investment in European cannabis from US and Canadian companies
Those are the stories we’re watching today. Join 10,000 others and catch all these stories and more in your inbox everyday at 7 am with our Cannabis Daily newsletter.
See you all tomorrow!
