Home > Canada Cannabis Spot Index Reports > Canada Cannabis Spot Index – November 6, 2020
Subscribe To Canada Spot Index

Canada Cannabis Spot Index (CCSI) 

Published November 6, 2020

1

*The provincial excise taxes vary. Cannabis Benchmarks estimates the population weighted average excise tax for Canada.

**CCSI is inclusive of the estimated Federal & Provincial cannabis excise taxes..

The CCSI was assessed at C$5.91 per gram this week, down 0.7% from last week’s C$5.96 per gram. This week’s price equates to US$2,036 per pound at the current exchange rate.

Include your weekly wholesale transactions in our price assessment by joining our Price Contributor Network

If you have not already done so, we invite you to join our Price Contributor Network, where market participants anonymously submit wholesale transactions to be included in our weekly price assessments. It takes two minutes to join and two minutes to submit each week, and comes with loads of extra data and market intelligence.

This week we provide an update on store counts nationwide. The Canadian cannabis industry has continued to open new retail outlets across the country at a steady clip. At the end of July, we crossed the milestone of 1,000 stores and expansion has not slowed since then. As of the end of October, we counted 1,226 licensed retailers, with an average monthly growth rate of 6.3% in 2020. This growth rate has been very consistent throughout the year, which gives us confidence that the cannabis industry will continue to grow at a stable rate in 2021.

Source: Cannabis Benchmarks

The 67-store increase in October was once again dominated by Ontario. Ontario did not hit its targeted 40 new stores during the month; rather, 32 new stores were opened in the province. Ontario now has 210 stores, which is contributing to a massive uptick in total cannabis sales. 

August’s reported sales were C$245M at the national level, and we should note that since then 142 new stores have opened, an increase of 13%. 

Source: Cannabis Benchmarks

As can be seen in the above chart, we have two linear fits. The last two reported months (July and August) have moved a step higher in the store to sales relationship. We believe that the end of COVID lockdowns, along with the increased availability of cannabis 2.0 products, propelled sales per store to a new level. Combined with the addition of new stores, we estimate total Canadian sales increased to between C$8.2 and $8.7M per day in October, resulting in total sales of more than C$300M last month.

For more data and analytics like this, subscribe to the Cannabis Market Insights report developed in collaboration Nasdaq. This in-depth monthly report provides exclusive data and analysis on the legal cannabis industry, focusing largely on the Canadian cannabis market, as well as the cannabis equities market in the U.S.