Shares of Massachusetts-based Curaleaf were headed higher on Wednesday despite turning in a mixed financial report for the second quarter.
The company posted a wider than expected loss yet still saw its shares explode as much as 10% after the report. This is in comparison to another marijuana company called Canopy Growth which saw a loss of 15% earlier this month when it reported a wider than expected net loss.
Curaleaf also topped revenue expectations with a $48.5 million top-line number and reported positive quarterly adjusted EBITDA for the first time in the company’s history.
According to CEO Joe Lusardi, the trend of positive EBITDA should continue as the more than $2 billion Curaleaf has poured into acquisitions that will help drive revenue growth.
This past spring Curaleaf said it would acquire West Coast-focused Cura Partners for nearly $1 billion and Chicago-based Grassroots.
“We’ll continue to grow the top line, profitably. We’ll continue to drive EBITDA as our scale becomes more obvious and we get the benefits of all the work we’ve done to grow our company,” Lusardi said to Yahoo Finance in an interview on YFi PM.
“We believe we’ll get our [Massachusetts] adult-use licenses later this year and that’ll set us up with a huge tailwind going into 2020,” he also said. “If you look at the data out of Massachusetts and the stores that are open, the numbers are fantastic so we’re very optimistic that that will be one of the most important cannabis markets next year, and we’’ll be a big player in that space.”
“The thesis is not complicated, we believe that U.S. cannabis is a $100 billion industry. It was only an $11 billion regulated [industry] last year,” Lusardi also remarked. “We will continue to grow the top line, convert people from the black market to the legal market and if you believe in that thesis, you should buy these stocks.”
