About 63 per cent of the licensed medical cannabis producers surveyed said they’d “very likely” seek American venture capital compared with 23 per cent who would "very likely" seek Canadian venture capital.

Canadian cannabis companies are hungry for U.S. private investment, according to a survey conducted by Statistics Canada looking at the state of the marijuana industry.

Of the 55 licensed medical cannabis producers surveyed at the end of 2017, 63 per cent said they were “very likely” to seek “American private venture capital” to help finance expansion ahead of recreational legalization. Only 23 per cent said they were “very likely” to seek Canadian private venture capital.

Results of the survey were published Thursday, along with other StatsCan data, as “a snapshot of licensed cannabis producers.” The data, taken together, provides considerable insight into the sector as it picked up steam over the past two years.

“Most responding companies indicated they were indeed likely to seek investment financing,” StatsCan noted. “Personal finance, American private venture capital and angel investors were the most frequently-mentioned sources of potential new capital.”

More than half of the companies said they intended to invest in “structures,” likely greenhouse infrastructure or other grow facilities.

The survey found that 2,399 people were working in Canada’s legal marijuana industry at the end of 2017 – although the actual number was likely higher, as StatsCan only surveyed the 55 producers that had received licenses as of September 2017.

The most common occupation was cultivation and harvesting, making up 32 per cent of employees. This was followed by 14 per cent in administration and 11 per cent in sales. Another 10 per cent of employees were involved in processing and manufacturing.

Employees made up the largest expense in the sector in 2016 (the year expense and revenue data is sourced from), with roughly one-third of reported expenses due to wages and salaries. Raw materials made up the next largest expense, followed by professional and business fees.

“Total expenses (industry-wide) were $302.8 million compared to revenue of $245.7 million, implying a loss for the year of $57.1 million,” StatsCan noted.  

That kind of loss is to be expected in an industry scaling up to sell into a market that’s not yet legal. Although marijuana sales to medical patients doubled between 2016 and 2017, the total quantity sold was far short of the amount produced, as companies built up inventories.

At the end of the year, the 55 licensed producers had grown 80,535 kilograms of dried cannabis and stockpiled 38,027 kilograms of that.

Over the past few months, StatsCan has been developing an increasingly robust picture of the cannabis industry and the economic potential of the adult-use recreational market. Along with crowdsourcing data on black market prices, StatsCan is tracking how much Canadians are consuming.

Last week, it released data suggesting around 4.2 million Canadians older than 15 reported some cannabis use in the past three months. More than half of these respondents said they used cannabis daily or weekly. A quarter of users reported spending more than $250 over the past three months on marijuana.

“Of the Canadians who did not use cannabis in the past three months, 6 per cent said they would likely try cannabis or increase their consumption. In turn, about a quarter (24 per cent) of current cannabis users said they would likely increase their cannabis consumption after legalization,” StatsCan noted.

Of particular interest to people trying to develop a legal industry to rival the black market, almost half of the surveyed cannabis users said they would change their current source of supply when adult-use is legalized.