Canopy Growth reports better retail cannabis availability as revenues soar

Canopy Growth, Canada’s largest cannabis producer, said it had improved retail availability as it reported a surge in revenue from the country’s newly legal recreational market.

The Ontario-based company reported revenue of C$83 million, a 282 percent increase, in its third quarter 2018 results in largely driven by the market for recreational marijuana, which became legal in October 2018. But it posted at C$157.2 million loss because of expenses from operations.

“We moved more containers in October than we did in the history of the company in that time. We had cannabis coast to coast,” CEO Bruce Linton said during a call with analysts on Friday.

The company sold just more than 22,000 pounds of cannabis products during the quarter, which ended December 31. About 70 percent of that went to the Canadian recreational market.

Canopy Growth is aggressively scaling up its ability to deliver more cannabis production to the Canadian recreational market and reported that it had improved retail availability.

Consumers have contended with a limited number of stores licensed to sell marijuana and shortages of the product itself since Canada legalized recreational cannabis in October.

“This is not a stockpiling exercise at all. Dealing with the allocation of a scarce resource is a top three priority in the company,” Linton said.

Linton said he expects retail distribution to improve as individual provinces license and open more stores.  

“By the time we get to Q4, you’re going to have a lot more stores and a lot more products and a lot more people who want to go to them,” Linton said.

The company recently added two million square feet of greenhouses, which will give it 4.3 million square feet in cannabis-growing facilities across Canada, Lipton said. He did not provide a timeline on when the new greenhouses would yield more cannabis.

Canopy Growth recently added individual rolled joints and soft gels to the market. It also plans to increase the volume of products that use cannabis oils such as vape pens and beverages.

The company is also positioning itself into the U.S. market with the signing of the Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018, which legalized the production of hemp. In January, it announced it plans to open an industrial hemp park in New York.

“The U.S. action is moving quite quickly,” Linton said.