- Icon Exploration Inc.’s vision is to be a leader in Canada’s medicinal and recreational cannabis markets
- Icon’s strategy is to acquire through a reverse merger with a vertically integrated cannabis company
- Acquisition would give Icon a 40,000-square-foot cultivation facility and an option on a 125,000-square-foot farm/extraction space
Icon Exploration Inc. (TSX.V: IEX.H) has set its sights on entering the Canadian cannabis industry, which Deloitte predicts will surpass $7 billion this year, including $4.4 billion in legalized recreational cannabis alone (http://ibn.fm/vEayT). To enter this market, Icon anticipates a reverse merger with cannabis company City View Green (“CVG”), which has already applied to Health Canada for an ACMPR license (http://ibn.fm/G33gt).
Icon Exploration is pursuing a strategy of vertical integration. The company plans to “use the burgeoning market as a platform to bring modernization to other verticals, specifically with regard to cannabis derivatives and extracts,” such as edibles, tinctures, capsules and oils (http://ibn.fm/tTY9K).
With the move, Icon would acquire CVG’s planned 40,000-square-foot growing facility in Brantford, Ontario. In addition, Icon would obtain 125,000 square feet of space that could be used for the production of cannabis vertical products, which could play a key role in the company’s marketing strategy.
“We’re entering the market at just the right time. We’re getting in at the second inning of a long ball game,” Icon Exploration CEO Rob Fia saod in an interview last year with Postmedia Content Works (http://ibn.fm/o8D2A). “There’s a lot of room to be a powerful entry into the space, and once the market sees what we’ve done here, it will be very exciting.”
Deloitte’s second report on Canada’s cannabis market, ‘A Society in Transition, an Industry Ready to Bloom’, projects that more than half — or $4.34 billion — of the estimated $7 billion in sales seen this year will come from legal recreational cannabis. Another $1.79 billion is forecast to come from medical cannabis, while the illegal market could ring up more than $1 billion in sales, per Deloitte.
For more information, visit the company’s website at www.IconExploration.net
