Canada Cannabis Spot Index (CCSI) 

Week Ending July 16, 2021

CCSI image 1 2021-07-16

*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$5.55 per gram this week, up 0.5% from last week’s C$5.52 per gram. This week’s price equates to US$2,011 per pound at the current exchange rate.

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Last week, Statistics Canada released retail sales data for April 2021, with nationwide legal cannabis sales reaching a new monthly high of C$309.7M. This is the first month where sales have exceeded the C$300M threshold, which marks a major milestone for the industry. All this while the illicit market still controls over half the total retail cannabis market, as we reported last week.

To correct for the different number of days in each month, we look at average daily sales in the chart below, which shows April 2021 sales reaching C$10.3M per day.

Source: Cannabis Benchmarks, Statscan

This week we sliced up 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.

This is a flow diagram of the calculation we performed for each province.

The result of these calculations is shown by month in the chart below. As seen, the legal market spending rate is increasing for almost every province. This fits the story of lower prices and more accessibility to brick-and-mortar stores. 

Alberta is leading the way with its spending habits. A typical Alberta cannabis user, who purchases cannabis from the legal channel, spends C$6.40 each month. This is approximately C$1.80 or 40% more than they spent last year. The strong Alberta spend makes sense with the largest retail footprint per capita. Ontario comes second in line, while British Columbia and Quebec show the lowest spend.

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.