Canada Cannabis Spot Index (CCSI)
Week Ending August 13, 2021
*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$5.31 per gram this week, down 1.7% from last week’s C$5.40 per gram. This week’s price equates to US$1,923 per pound at the current exchange rate.
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Last week Statistics Canada released retail sales data for May 2021, with nationwide legal cannabis sales reaching a new monthly high of C$313.3M. This is the second month where sales have exceeded the C$300M threshold, which marks a new baseline for the industry. All this while illicit commerce still constitutes over half the total retail cannabis market, as we reported in our July 9 report.
To correct for the different number of days in each month, we look at average daily sales in the chart below, which shows May 2021 sales reaching C$10.1M per day, slightly lower than April 2021.
As we did last month, we sliced the above data in a slightly different way. Instead of just looking at the provincial sales outright, we have broken down the number to calculate the average monthly sales per cannabis user. Each province has a different usage rate that is estimated by Statistics Canada through a quarterly survey. For the following analysis, we applied the appropriate provincial usage rate.
Alberta continues to have the highest monthly cannabis sales per user in the legal market. A typical Alberta cannabis user, who purchases cannabis from a legal source, spends C$6.20 each month. This is approximately C$1.40 more than they spent last year. The strong Alberta spending rate makes sense with the largest retail footprint per capita. Ontario has the second highest spending rate, while British Columbia and Quebec show the lowest spending rate. If each province had the same monthly spending rate as Alberta, the legal cannabis market would have exceeded C$580M in sales in the month of May 2021, representing roughly 85% of the total estimated cannabis demand in the country.
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.