According to a researcher, the Canadian province of Ontario has roughly 4% of the legal cannabis points of sale it needs to put it on par with markets that are successfully extinguishing illicit channels.
Chris Damas, the editor of Ontario-based BCMI Cannabis Report, has estimated that Ontario would need an additional 1,400 points of sale to reach the one-per-10,000-people mark observed in Colorado and Alberta.
Ontario started accepting open-market applications on Jan. 6th and as of April 29th, the province authorized almost five dozen stores.
Damas estimates that Quebec’s cannabis point of sale deficiency at 95% – meaning it is roughly 800 stores shy.
Alberta’s 449 points of sale exceed what the province needs, Damas remarked.
Saskatchewan, which recently started accepting cannabis store applications for small communities, could use about 70 more points of sale. More than 180 stores have opened in British Columbia, making it 65% deficient in points of sale.
“The headwinds are receding and I see some tailwinds,” Damas said, who sees store counts improving through this and next year.
According to the researcher, 2020 adult-use sales in Canada will reach of CA$2.1 billion ($1.5 billion).
“Pretty much every province except Alberta needs more stores in some form,” Brock University business professor Michael Armstrong remarked. “Stores absolutely do matter.”
“If governments would allow (cannabis) stores to sell other things, at least in rural areas, then that would support much greater store numbers,” Armstrong said.
“That would allow legal products to reach a much wider market in areas that are more sparsely populated. Stores are definitely important in making the legal product accessible and the legal industry successful.”
Last week, CIBC Capital Markets, the investment banking subsidiary of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, shed nearly 1 billion dollars off its 2020 forecast for cannabis sales in the country.
