Yahoo Finance Canopy Growth CEO: 'For sure there's a marijuana bubble'
Canopy Growth Corporation saw its shares fall 13% on Wednesday after reporting disappointing earnings that included a revenue decline. Analysts had expected better results from Canopy after Canada launched legal recreational marijuana sales on Oct. 17.
But Canopy’s (CGC) shares are still up 30% this year. And its cannabis industry peer Tilray is up 360% this year. The frenzy over weed stocks continues. Many have called it a bubble.
Canopy Growth CEO Bruce Linton doesn’t disagree.
“For sure there’s a marijuana bubble,” he said on Yahoo Finance’s Midday Movers show on Wednesday. “I don’t know somebody who’s not talking about it. And I don’t know somebody who isn’t putting out a press release that says they’re in the business. And when they put the press release out, their company is worth half a billion dollars.”
That being said, Linton says Canopy’s six years of experience in the industry, plus a big recent investment from Constellation Brands, give it an edge amidst the noise.
“We have about four-and-a-half million square feet of production in Canada,” Linton says. Constellation Brands (STZ), which brews Corona and Modelo beer among others “just invested $4 billion U.S. in us after working with us for two years and getting to know us very well. So I would say there are very good companies inside the bubble, not dissimilar to how probably Google was perceived in that bubble.”
Some may scoff at the mere suggestion that Canopy Growth has anything in common with Google. And there remains, in the U.S., major concerns about the viability of the legal marijuana market, since it remains illegal at the federal level, which makes it hard for cannabis companies, even in states that have legalized, to get business bank accounts, and creates additional hurdles.
Linton doesn’t see the cannabis business landscape in America changing much for a while—even if the U.S. does legalize recreational weed at the federal level. “It seems that there’s an awful lot of interest now state-by-state,” he says. “So it doesn’t look to me like there’s going to be a big appetite for interstate commerce. If there was going to be interstate commerce because it became federally legal, I’m not sure that the opportunities that exist in a lot of these states that have it for production and conversion would exist there, because it’s not economically practical to do large-scale production where you have very high land costs or very limited water rights. I think it will end up being a patchwork, which is fine with us.”
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Daniel Roberts is a senior writer at Yahoo Finance. Follow him on Twitter at @readDanwrite.
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