Cannabis craze weeds out junior mining field
The boom compares favourably with the headwinds junior miners faced during the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s
A boom in cannabis investment is siphoning capital away from mining and hitting junior miners hardest, forcing them to up their game and potentially improving the quality of projects in a sector long rife with cowboy speculators. Canada’s relaxation of cannabis laws culminated in legalisation for recreational use in October 2018. Other jurisdictions are following suit or liberalising their laws on medical or health use, creating an industry that has lured a breed of high-risk, high-return investors. The world’s top three listed cannabis companies — Canopy Growth, Tilray and Aurora Cannabis — have a combined market value of around $30bn. And consumers are expected to spend more than $7bn on cannabis products in Canada alone in 2019 , according to Deloitte. In Africa, where miners met this week for Cape Town’s African Mining Indaba conference, cannabis companies are setting up projects in Lesotho, while other countries, including Zimbabwe and SA, plan to issue licences. “Raising money...
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