This past week, a democratic congressman introduced legislature to fully legalize marijuana across the country. The legislation isn’t going to pass, especially not in our current political climate. It certainly won’t pass while Trump or Pence are in office which, for CanIDeal, is a very, very good thing. Why is that? Let’s call it the “sweet spot,” a market that is too small to justify the expense of players like Big Tobacco and Big Pharma to participate, which allows companies like CanIDeal to build a national brand without needing to have a vast bank account. It also means that when cannabis does become legal on a national level, we will be an established national brand that is ripe for acquisition.
According to ArcView and BDS Analytics, North Americans spent a total of $56 billion on marijuana last year. In 2016, legal cannabis sales in North America reached about $6.6 billion; recreational marijuana sales accounted for roughly 29% of that figure, while the remaining 71% went to medical marijuana. Although significant, the $6.6 billion still represents less than 12% of the total market ArcView estimated for legal and illegal cannabis—and $6.6 billion is not enough to tempt Big Tobacco and Pharma.
While legal cannabis only accounted for 12% of the total market in 2016, we all know that Big Tobacco and their lobbyists would like to increase their sales by $56 billion. You have to ask yourself, “Who wouldn’t want to increase their sales by $56 billion?” So as you can imagine, Big Tobacco is busy funding campaigns with politicians keen to the full legalization of cannabis in the US. This is because they know that they can afford to spend the money to increase the adoption of the cannabis market by politicians, and as they do, the current administration will eventually finish its term.
So how does this work to benefit CanIDeal and our investors? Simply put, every dollar that is spent by Big Tobacco to lobby for medical and recreational cannabis is a dollar spent in our favor! Millennial voters overwhelmingly support the legalization of cannabis, so as politicians work to appeal this new and growing voter base, armed with dollars contributed by Big Tobacco, more and more states will continue to jump onto the cannabis bandwagon and our protected multi-billion-dollar market will continue to expand state by state, without any fear of Big Tobacco or Pharma jumping into the game to compete.
Once they do, we will have made our money. In fact, even if we just get 10% of the $6.6 billion market, we will see unit prices skyrocket. What will CanIDeal’s balance sheet look like when the market is $12 Billion? How much will it be worth when the market is $25 billion? Once the country goes fully legal, Big Pharma and Tobacco will jump in to take advantage of the $56 billion marketplace. They will want to acquire a sales entity with an established customer base. CanIDeal is just that sales entity, which will have been operating for years, have a super healthy balance sheet and be perfectly placed for an acquisition.
This is where we are going. How do we know this? We have the inside track of how to navigate this marketplace. We’ve been working closely with BDS Analytics, the leader in cannabis business intelligence, who has crafted the numbers quoted by Forbes, Time Magazine, The Wall Street Journal and other major publications. They can clearly see the future of the market and why CanIDeal’s E-Commerce engine is a necessary component, and they believe that the success of CanIDeal will be another home run for them as well as for all of us.
