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Craig Wiggins of the independent analysis firm TheCannalysts brought more doom and gloom during a presentation at the expo on Friday.

By the end of October, licensed producers were storing 721 days of inventory, he said. That could hit 816 days a year from now, according to his optimistic forecasting.

“This will be catastrophic unless certain things happen,” Wiggins said. “More retails stores and ‘2.0’ does not fix this. Something has to give. We need companies to go out of business. It sucks to say it, but we need a rightsizing of the harvests. We need people to write off inventory.”

Wiggins said Canada’s licensed producers had good growth in sales by volume after legalization, up 25 per cent between October 2018 and February 2019, and 109 per cent between March and August. But growth then flattened to about one per cent between August and October 2019.

“That is far from the market that all the big firms were telling you about,” he said.

“A big part of why we haven’t rolled out well is there isn’t access to stores, there isn’t enough 2.0 product out there, price, quality, convenience.”

Photo by Mike Bell / PNG

Meantime, licensed producers continue to harvest at a rate that far exceeds legal sales, about 4.42 kilograms for every kilogram sold, Wiggins lamented.

“The optimistic scenarios get us to 2.26 — that’s still way too high,” he said. “We have too much inventory.”

Wiggins said cultivation must be throttled back, inventory destroyed, or sales must increase to an “impossible” level.