This guest article was provided by Kaylei Conor, a writer on the legal cannabis landscape.
EVIO Labs across the country prepare for farmers bounty.
Author – Kaylei Conor (@kayleiconor)
September means football season for fans who love the NFL and NCAA, and it also means back to school for millions of college students. In recent years, September has also come to mean that it’s harvest season for the nation’s newest legal cash crops: Cannabis.
It wasn’t that long ago that the only data generated from the annual fall cannabis harvest was that of arrest records published by law enforcement and photo-ops of thousands of cannabis plants seized by the DEA. This year, Wall Street research analysts will have their eyes glued on the results of this year’s coast-to-coast cannabis harvest like never before, as more and more cannabis and cannabis-related deals are trading on public exchanges for investors to take advantage of what is arguably the fastest growing agricultural sector in the world.
In the past 5 years, 100,000 jobs have been created across the country in cannabis-related companies, and at least 50 of those jobs have been at the life science company EVIO Inc., currently trading on the OTCQB under the symbol SGBYD. Located in Bend, Oregon, the company operates in a very unique niche in the sector: a chain of nine EVIO analytical testing laboratories staffed by professional scientists that provide accredited analytical testing services and scientific research to the regulated cannabis industry in five states coast-to-coast.
The company’s EVIO Labs division provides state-mandated ancillary services in place to ensure the safety and quality of the nation’s cannabis supply- an enviable position indeed. Legislated revenues to guarantee the safety of the nation’s cannabis supply. Genius.
Early this year, the company reported 1.5 million dollars in revenue in their Q2 2017 financials for last year’s harvest season from four analytical laboratories testing cannabis samples in Oregon. In the past 12 months, the company has added operating EVIO Labs in Sacramento, California, serving the world famous Humboldt County area, Denver, Colorado, and Southborough, MA to their portfolio; additionally, the company and has two EVIO Labs currently working through the respective accreditation processes in Fort Lauderdale, Florida and Costa Mesa, California.
With 29 states representing 190 million Americans or over 60% of the total US population with some form of access to legal cannabis, and with eight of those states having full recreational sales in place for cannabis products, the annual harvest is of great interest to many observers. There will be an estimated 1 million pounds of cannabis harvested across the country over the next 8 weeks.
That’s an estimate that’s probably on the low side, but is nonetheless a truly groundbreaking number, as it represents at a minimum 2.5 billion dollars of wholesale business that is not going into the pockets of criminal drug cartels. When a retail markup and diversification of that raw product into the myriad of edible, oil, analgesic, and other products developed by entrepreneurs across the nation is broken down, that number will likely be pushing 10 billion dollars of revenue generated by the nation’s cannabis industry in 2017.
Ten billion dollars removed from the clutches of criminal cartels running guns and trafficking in women and children and financing terror. Rather, those dollars are flowing into the tax coffers of state and city governments while employing thousands of people, freeing up thousands of law enforcement officers across the country to focus on more pressing criminal matters affecting citizens every day, and of course delivering on the American Dream every day to countless small business entrepreneurs.
It is important to note that many financial analysts and investors agree that EVIO Inc. is not really defined as a “pure cannabis play” by definition, in the parlance of investment bankers and attorneys, since they “don’t touch the leaf.” They can easily be identified as an analytical lab testing company that specializes in cannabis – which means that we might well be looking at the very first company testing cannabis trading on the NASDAQ or NYSE sooner than you can imagine.
This speculation ties in nicely with EVIO’s recent announcement of the consolidation of their stock structure. When we first discovered this deal last year, it was trading on the dreaded pink sheet exchange with a fully diluted stock structure in excess of 1 billion shares. Last week, the company finalized a new stock structure much more appealing and comfortable to investors looking for an opportunity to make some profit on what is the fastest growing agricultural sector in the world.
With 21.35 million shares fully diluted and over 13 million of those closely held by the company’s founders, leaving only 7 million in the public float the company has positioned itself for the next stage of growth.
EVIO CEO Will Waldrop has indicated in their recent press conversation that funding opportunities are opening up with partners who have an aligned vision of the company’s future in launching new testing laboratories in what will be the single largest retail cannabis market on earth in California in 2018, as well as bio-tech IP opportunities contained in the mountain of data and science that over 50,000 tests performed by the company in the past two years have delivered. The annual fall cannabis harvest is underway and the company’s financials should reflect that green rush in January 2018, which means it might be a good time for a savvy investor to take a closer look at EVIO and its potential for profit in your portfolio.
Kaylei Conor is a writer on the legal cannabis marketplace and its profound effect on the American economy. Inquiries: @kayleiconor
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