Medicinal cannabis in Germany - Business Report

169 Confidential __________________________________________________________________________________ For example, the market analysis company Brightfield Group from Chicago estimates that the mar- ket for medical Cannabis in Germany will have a turnover of around 73 million US dollars in 2018 and will grow to 2.7 billion US dollars by 2023 1 . In view of the 75 million euros (i.e. about 86 million US dollars) that the SHI alone paid for Cannabis prescriptions in 2018, the first part of the Brightfield esti- mate can be considered extremely cautious. This applies less to the second part of the estimate, which promises annual growth of almost 200 percent . Other market statements are based on estimates of the proportion of the population and thus the number of people in Germany who are eligible for treatment with medicinal Cannabis. InMay last year, the doctors' journal “ Ärzteblatt ” reported a number of up to 14,000 persons, and the doctors' journal “Handelsblatt” reported in April 2019 an extrapolation according to which currently about 40,000 pa- tients are treated with Cannabis. This also corresponds to the consumption data that we were able to obtain from the INSIGHT Health database. But in any case, this is only a "modest beginning" of the Cannabis market development. The "Inter- national Association for Cannabinoid Medicines" (International Association for Cannabinoid Medi- cines) writes in its "ACM-Announcement from the 10 th March 2019: In industrialised countries, about 1 to 2% of the population need Cannabis products to relieve their suffering. This corresponds to 800,000 to 1,600,000 citizens for Germany. In this respect the current figures are a document of the undersupply of Cannabis drugs to the population ". Although the wide range of needs estimates con- siderably reduces their informative value, even the lower value of 800,000 potential patients would mean at least a twenty-fold increase in the number of patients today. In any case, expectations for the future Cannabis market in Germany are high - high enough for a number of companies to invest in this market. For example, the Frankfurt pharmaceutical start-up Farmako, which has just launched its first Cannabis product in February 2019, plans to import a total of about 40 tons of medicinal Cannabis from Poland over the next four years. In view of the total annual volume of all suppliers of 2.7 tonnes in 2018, this is certainly an ambitious project. As of November 2019, Farmako was acquired by the Canadian manufacturer AgraFlora Organ- ics for an alleged 15 million euros. 6 https://internationalcbc.com/germany-europes-biggest-medical-Cannabis-market-expected-to-top-cbd-sales-by-2023/ (14.09.2019)