Chart: Is The Rise In Florida Centric Cannabis Stock Prices Overdone? (Probably Not!)

Florida-centric cannabis stocks rose more than the overall market last week as investors awaited an April 1, 2024 deadline for the Florida Supreme Court to rule on whether adult Floridians will be allowed to vote for on a constitutional amendment to legalize adult recreational cannabis -- which was approved on Monday.

Viridian calculated an estimate of the torque that each company has with regard to Florida.  The measure (shown in the green bars) is the number of dispensaries each company has in Florida divided by the company’s enterprise value. Cansortium (TIUM.USD: CSE) and AYRWF (AYR.A: CSE) are the two companies with the highest torque, followed by Planet 13 CSE, and Cannabist (CBST: Cboe).  The orange line depicts last week’s percentage increase in each company’s stock.

Investors clearly believed the bill would be approved by the Florida Supreme Court.  The graph shows Florida-centric stocks outpaced stocks with less or no contribution from Florida.

With the go-ahead by the Court, recreational use in Florida still has one additional major hurdle. The constitutional amendment requires a 60% supermajority to pass and that is a tough standard.  The first time Floridians voted on medical cannabis in 2014, the measure received 57% of the vote, failing to meet the 60% criteria.  The measure passed with a 71% approval in 2016.  Ohio voters approved adult-use last year by a 57% level.  The polls are all over the place with a University of North Florida poll in 2023 showing 70% support but a Florida Chamber of Commerce poll released in January showed 57% voter support.

How big would Florida Adult use be? The rule of thumb in the industry says that when markets go adult, revenues roughly double. Florida estimated 2024 sales are approximately $2.8B, so the impact of a doubling would represent a 7.3% increase in total 2024 U.S. Cannabis sales. The rule of thumb may even be a bit conservative with regard to Florida.  If Florida legalized sales approached the level of Colorado on a $/per adult resident basis, sales would rise by closer to 120%. The potential for Florida and Pennsylvania to both turn rec is one of the reasons Viridian believes consensus growth estimates for 2025 are likely to be beaten.

The gains could be immense for the companies with the highest Florida torque. If one estimates, for example, that Florida represents 75% of Cansortium’s LTM revenues of $95M, and one projects a doubling of those revenues valued at  1x EV/revenue, it could represent a doubling of the stock. Florida rec might be a bigger deal for Cansortium than rescheduling

AYR might be a similar story.  Florida represents 70% of AYR’s stores, approximately 57% of its cultivation square feet, and about 40% of its employees.  The company does not disclose Florida revenues, but would it be crazy to guess 50% of the company’s revenues come from Florida?  Doubling those revenues and valuing them at 1x could also represent a doubling of the stock.

The impacts of a full doubling of Florida revenues will not be fully realized in 2025 or perhaps even 2026, but the impacts are so significant that Investors need to keep a close eye on players with high Florida torque.

The Viridian Capital Chart of the Week highlights key investment, valuation and M&A trends taken from the Viridian Cannabis Deal Tracker.

The Viridian Cannabis Deal Tracker provides the market intelligence that cannabis companies, investors, and acquirers utilize to make informed decisions regarding capital allocation and M&A strategy. The Deal Tracker is a proprietary information service that monitors capital raise and M&A activity in the legal cannabis, CBD, and psychedelics industries. Each week the Tracker aggregates and analyzes all closed deals and segments each according to key metrics:

• Deals by Industry Sector (To track the flow of capital and M&A Deals by one of 12 Sectors - from Cultivation to Brands to Software)
• Deal Structure (Equity/Debt for Capital Raises, Cash/Stock/Earnout for M&A) Status of the company announcing the transaction (Public vs. Private)
• Principals to the Transaction (Issuer/Investor/Lender/Acquirer) Key deal terms (Pricing and Valuation)
• Key Deal Terms (Deal Size, Valuation, Pricing, Warrants, Cost of Capital)
• Deals by Location of Issuer/Buyer/Seller (To Track the Flow of Capital and M&A Deals by State and Country)
• Credit Ratings (Leverage and Liquidity Ratios)

Since its inception in 2015, the Viridian Cannabis Deal Tracker has tracked and analyzed more than 2,500 capital raises and 1,000 M&A transactions totaling over $50 billion in aggregate value.

This article is from an external unpaid contributor. It does not represent Benzinga's reporting and has not been edited for content or accuracy.