A new report on the state of the legal cannabis industry found that regulated marijuana sales in North America totaled $6.7 billion in 2016, a 30 percent increase from 2015.
Arcview Market Research released limited details of its findings from its “State of Legal Marijuana Markets Report.” An executive summary will be released on Jan. 16 and the full report will be released in February.
Arcview said that legal marijuana sales are projected to grow “at a compound annual growth rate of 25 percent … to an estimated $20.2 billion by 2021.”
Current figures are boosted by huge growth in existing legal markets in the U.S. and estimates for future growth point to the addition of states where marijuana measures were just approved by voters. Canada is also included in Arcview’s annual market estimates and projections.
“No estimation of the size of the legal cannabis industry is complete without recognizing the new massive role Canada’s market will play as it moves toward legalizing adult use,” Tom Adams, Arcview Market Research’s editor-in-chief, said in a news release. “The only consumer industry categories I’ve seen reach $5 billion in annual spending and then post anything like 25 percent compound annual growth in the next five years are cable television (19 percent) in the 1990s and the broadband internet (29 percent) in the 2000s.”
Adams said that the biggest game changers going forward is the four new states that approved adult-use measures.
“Twenty-one percent of the total U.S. population now live in legal adult-use markets,” Adams said. “Spending in the largest three adult-use markets (Colorado, Washington and Oregon) was up 62 percent through September after doubling in 2015, fueled in large part by the sudden popularity of alternative ingestion methods such as edibles and concentrates.”
The Arcview Group was founded in 2010 and bills itself as the first and most oft-cited publisher of market research. It says its new and revised market projections rely on “a new proprietary bottom-up point of sale foundation with millions of individual consumer transactions from dispensary partners in the largest legal cannabis markets across the country created by BDS Analytics.”
