Last week, we were able to get a sense of the mood within the industry, and it seems it depends on the size of the provider.
At the large scale and the small scale, we were seeing businesses looking hopeful for bigger and bigger profits in the years to come.
A new CNN report details this feeling, citing the pandemic boost as a big reason for the positive outlook. But also, a realization that that boost was more of a launching point than a blip.
“You’re seeing the next phase of a maturing industry take hold here,” Chris Walsh, MJBizDaily CEO, told CNN.
More and more companies are able to raise huge sums of money, including Dutchie, which just raised $350 million in an investor round.
But then you have the mid-tier businesses who don’t see a future with space for them to prosper. Mergers are becoming more and more common, and bigger businesses are engulfing their younger siblings. The national level of awareness that mid-tier companies dream of can end up being the exact awareness that gets them acquired by the biggest cannabis companies in the country.
Of course, this isn’t the worst outcome in the world for many businesses. A big payout may be just the lifeline they need. However, the mid-tier level of production is where we typically find the most interesting products, and one of the byproducts of less competition is inevitably less variety. This is where the pessimism at this level stems from.
Nonetheless, this industry is in the midst of a huge growth spurt, and that excitement will drown out the smaller concerns in the middle. In 2020, there were an estimated 321,000 full-time jobs in the weed, up from 234,000 in 2019. An almost 100,000 increase in workers.
“Take a look around. People want to get out of their old-school, dying industry, and they want to move into cannabis,” says Karson Humiston, CEO of Vangst. “This is it. Now is the moment to get involved, because it’s never going to be this small again.”
Read the CNN story here.
