lazur
1 week ago
In the long list of "came and went" runs in the MJ space, this may be the camiest and wentiest of all of them. I suppose now we wait to see if congress will only dangle the carrot of safe banking past the November elections, and then fall back on their usual inaction more resolutely. My one speculative hope in the interim is that if the schedule 3 move becomes more assured as to when (hopefully also not past November), the bigger fish, once getting their taxes in order, may get ripe for takeovers and buyouts of the smaller fish again. Of which I hope SHWZ ends up being one.
lazur
1 week ago
Yep, SHWZ gets tax advantages with this change (IRS related write downs, no small thing), but we still need to recover the onside kick of Safe banking and then score with recreational legalization at the federal level. But all that is struggling against a reactionary wave in many states (states gaining more power in the current Fed vs State historical struggle in the US), in places like Florida where Desantis is speaking out against MJ rec use, and others. Shwz moved a whopping 11 cents yesterday on volume over 6 times its daily average, trailing greatly other MJ stocks in terms of yesterday's bump. So we remain a lagger, struggling even to get back to a dollar after this news. So giddy excitement is not really warranted. And I agree with StevenRisk that management should have addressed the settlement the other day, as well as the DEA move, even if it was just a simple, boilerplate statement of what the rescheduling means to them in clear operational benefits. But management seems almost afraid to let anyone know they even exist.
Future2016
1 month ago
“In terms of the retail market, Colorado sales were down approximately 15% on a year-over-year basis compared to our growth of almost 8%. Population in the state remained flat year-over-year, with overall store count down 3%, driven really by a reduction in medical dispensaries and also offset by low single-digit growth in the recreational stores.
“Sales volume was down about 15% year-over-year in Q4 and we’re seeing sequential improvement and we’re in a developed market and certainly going through some growing pains as demand and supply kind of normalize. But we’re built really to withstand this and I love the opportunity for us to compete in a tough, challenging market, and I think, things are certainly going to improve.
“From a wholesale perspective, cultivation licenses count in Colorado have come down roughly 22%, which is a sizable move from approximately 1,200 licenses at the end of 2022 to over 920 as of Q4 2023, which is below pre-COVID license counts.
“We’re starting to see pricing stabilization, as Forrest mentioned, in the state with flower AMR remaining around $750 in Q4 and plant counts back to 2018, 2019 levels. So we’re certainly starting to see stabilization and we believe there’s improvement around the corner, but we’re going to continue to execute, we believe, in the short-term in a tough market.
“To summarize, we believe it’s going to be leveling out with steady flower AMR and believe shows stability regardless of how we really think about retail pricing pressure. We feel good about where we’re headed from a wholesale perspective standpoint.
“Looking ahead, we believe we can maintain solid retail margins, utilize the wholesale penetration growth to protect our CPG margins and we’ll benefit from modest increase in wholesale pricing as supply settles down.
“This could be a shakeout year for Colorado and our lightweight capital model, strong retail capabilities, we believe position us very well to continue to grow share of wallet from our customers. We’re going to continue to focus on retail execution and optimizing customer acquisition with loyalty and retention and unlocking liquidity through our current asset base.” - Justin Dye
Future2016
1 month ago
“In New Mexico, it’s still a young market, and as we mentioned on the call, sales have increased 18% year-over-year in quarter four, but store count was up over 50%. So, that’s led to about 20% lower revenue on a per-store basis to levels that we believe cannot be sustained as they’re roughly about 50% of the Colorado market. We’re seeing closures trend upwards in recent months and starting to see net growth rates decline, so all of that is encouraging for us.” - Forrest Hoffmaster