Good morning. My name is Hilda, and I will be your conference operator today.
At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to Jushi Holdings Inc. Q2 2022 earnings conference call.
Today's call is being recorded. For the best sound quality, all participants have been placed in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. To ask a question, please press zero one using your touchtone phone.
I will now turn the call over to Michael Perlman, Executive Vice President of Investor Relations.
Thank you, sir. Please go ahead.
Good morning. Thank you for joining us today for Jushi Holdings, Inc. Q2 2022 earnings conference call.
Joining me on today's call are Jim Cacioppo, Chief Executive Officer, Chairman, and Founder, and Jon Barack, President, Interim Chief Financial Officer, and Founder of Jushi.
This morning, we issued a press release announcing our Q2 2022 financial results. The press release, along with the presentation that accompanies this call, are available on our website under the Investor Relations section and filed on SEDAR and EDGAR. On August 12, Jushi became a U.S. reporting issuer under the United States securities laws and has converted its accounting standards from IFRS to U.S. GAAP, beginning with our Q2 2022 results.
Thus, all financial information has been prepared based on U.S. GAAP.
Additionally, non-GAAP financial measures referenced on this call are reconciled to the most directly comparable U.S. GAAP measure in the company's earnings release and will be available in the company's MD&A for the quarter ended June 30, 2022, which will be filed on SEDAR. Before we begin, I'd like to remind listeners that certain matters discussed in today's presentation or answers that may be given to questions asked could constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of Canadian and United States securities laws, which by their nature involve estimates, projections, plans, goals, forecasts, and assumptions.
Actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements. The risk factors that may affect actual results are detailed in Jushi's S-1 registration statement and other periodic filings and registration statements. These documents may be accessed via EDGAR and SEDAR.
These forward-looking statements speak to only as of the date of this call and should not be relied upon as predictions of future events.
With that, I would now like to turn the call over to Jim Cacioppo, Chief Executive Officer, Chairman, and Founder of Jushi.
Thank you, Michael, and thank you everyone for joining our call today.
This morning, I would like to take a few minutes to provide an overview of our Q2 2022 performance and review our recent operational achievements. I will then turn the call over to Jon to review our financials in more detail. Before I provide an update on our outlook for the remainder of 2022, a question and answer period will then follow. In a challenging macroeconomic environment, I'm pleased to report solid Q2 revenue growth and more initiatives to improve profitability.
The company reported solid sequential and year-over-year top-line revenue growth for the Q2.
On a sequential basis, revenue increased 18%, driven primarily by the acquisitions in Nevada in the first half of 2022, increased retail and wholesale activity in Massachusetts, and growth in retail stores in Illinois and Virginia. Year-over-year revenue grew 52% to $73 million, compared to $48 million in the Q2 of 2021, driven by our acquisitions in Nevada and Massachusetts and new Beyond Hello store openings in Pennsylvania and Virginia.
On a GAAP basis, Adjusted EBITDA for the Q2 was approximately $0.5 million, as compared to a loss of $0.9 million in the Q1 of 2022. Let's move to slide six.
It is important to note that increasing the sell-through rate of our Jushi branded products is one of our more important initiatives and a significant profitability driver for the company in the coming quarters. As of the Q2, the sell-through rate of our own branded products improved by approximately 770 basis points to 21% of total retail revenue, as compared to approximately 14% in the Q1 of 2022, driven primarily by the acquisition of New Leaf.
Excluding the New Leaf acquisition, our own brand penetration increased by approximately 270 basis points to 16%. This is an encouraging signal as we look to increase the penetration of our own branded products in the second half of the year, especially as we continue to diversify our offerings and add new strains.
As a further data point, we've seen accelerating traction recently with our own branded sales of our flower and vape products in Pennsylvania, reaching levels as high as 40%+ of weekly units sold. Let's move to slide 7.
Throughout the Q2, we continued to aggressively execute on the cost savings measures we implemented at the beginning of the year, and I'm pleased to report that these efforts have led to another quarter of reduced operating expenses as a % of total overall revenue. I'd now like to provide a brief update on these initiatives. At retail, we continue to optimize our labor model to ensure we are allocating the appropriate amount of resources and staff across our footprint in alignment with market activity and demand.
For instance, in Virginia, where the patient registration requirement was recently lifted. We are improving our staffing structure and zoning of pharmacists to ensure we are providing the best in-store experience for the influx of new patients entering the medical program. Additionally, in late Q1, we brought on a labor analyst to support our retail team with the optimization of the labor model in our stores.
Together, they standardized store headcount and staff schedules to ensure optimized labor while maintaining best-in-class customer care and continued operational excellence. Part of this newly established standard includes a greater emphasis on utilization of part-time store team members, which gives us the ability to be highly flexible and nimble in managing any fluctuation in store revenue. We are starting to see the positive impact this optimization is having and expect to continue to realize that impact in Q3 and beyond.
Additionally, our vendor and product rationalization that we initiated in the Q1 gives us the ability to be more strategic with our pricing and frequency of promotions across our footprint, which has helped drive gross profit dollars and gives us a better understanding of the current purchasing habits and trends unique to each market.
Similar to what many of our peers have reported, we have seen average spend per transaction decline in the Q2, with smaller basket sizes showing a focus on value products. However, it has been more than offset by an increase in the number of visits and the number of new customers shopping at our stores. While we believe the cannabis business is recession-resistant, no business is completely recession-proof. We will continue to improve our vendor purchasing processes to further increase retail gross margins across our footprint.
Next, at our grower processor facilities, as our new grow rooms come online in the second half of this year, particularly in Virginia and Pennsylvania, we expect to see a meaningful improvement in the genetic diversity, quality, and yield of our harvests as we implement new processes and introduce new automation technologies.
This should increase cost efficiencies over time and allow us to realize higher margins for our branded product as quality and diversity of product improves. We expect the facility's KPI to be on an improving trend for the next twelve months as these facilities scale up and move along the learning curve to our desired peak operating goals. In both Pennsylvania and Virginia, we will be feeding our own substantial retail sales and will not be overly reliant on the wholesale market.
At the corporate level, with the exception of recruiting a replacement chief financial officer, we have completed the build-out of our executive and senior management team with the addition of Shaunna Patrick, who will oversee the growth of our wholesale sales as our new Executive Vice President of Wholesale Operations.
We are also in the final stages of hiring for our accounting and IT departments to support our transition to being a U.S. reporting issuer. I would now like to highlight our second-quarter operational achievements over the next few slides. Let's begin with slide 8, with an update on our state-level operations. In Nevada, we completed our acquisition of New Leaf, which significantly expanded our vertically integrated operations in the state.
This was our third acquisition in Nevada and substantially increased our presence in the market, with the addition of a 27,000 sq ft cultivation facility, a 13,000 sq ft processing facility, two operating retail dispensaries, and 1 licensed dispensary to be opened. Following the close of the acquisition, we opened the third New Leaf retail location on the Las Vegas Strip, bringing our total store count to four in the state. Let's move to slide 9 and 10. In Pennsylvania, we expanded our Scranton facility from 81,000 sq ft to approximately 123,000 sq ft.
We remain on track to more than double total number of operational grow rooms from 4 to 10 and increase canopy and annual biomass production to 36,000 sq ft and 22,000 pounds, respectively, by the end of this year.
In our new processing area of the facility, we have introduced various automation technologies, which we expect will drive efficiencies and improve quality in the coming quarters.
Our new hydrocarbon and solventless extraction and processing capabilities at the facility allow us to provide a full breadth of vape and concentrate product formats to the Pennsylvania market, which, as of August, are fully introduced to the market and are getting great patient reviews. We expect to further diversify our offering in the second half of the year with new strains of flowers, varieties which have just hit the market. Moving to slide 11. In Virginia, we have expanded our Manassas grower processor facility from 30,000 sq ft to approximately 93,000 sq ft.
We went from only 1 flower room planted early in the Q2 to 5 by the end of June and are expecting these new rooms to generate revenue at the end of this quarter, which is a bit delayed from last time we reported. Our target is to add 2 additional grow rooms for a total of 7 and increase canopy in the annual biomass production to 19,000 sq ft and 12,000 pounds, respectively, by the end of this year.
At the retail level in Virginia, both our Manassas and Sterling locations experienced a significant increase in revenue since July 1st. Following the removal of the patient registration process requirement, which eliminated a significant barrier for patients waiting to enter into the medical cannabis program.
As a point of reference, we saw approximately 1,950 new patients over the course of the whole Q2 before the change in the requirement.
In only the first month following the change, we saw approximately 2,300 new patients. August looks equally as promising, even though the state has experienced some product shortages. Subsequent to the Q2, we opened our third store in Alexandria, which was our most successful new store opening ever in terms of immediate sales in the weeks following the opening. In just a couple of days, we expect to open our fourth store in Fairfax, which we believe is also well-positioned for a strong opening.
As a reminder, both Fairfax and Alexandria stores are designed to be among the highest volume stores in the country, which we expect when Virginia brings on adult use in the Q1 of 2024. In Massachusetts, we have grown our wholesale business and expanded our offering of Jushi branded products we sell through our Nature's Remedy stores. We are now in 73 licensed dispensaries in Massachusetts, up from 62 as we previously reported in May of this year.
Continuing to slide 12. In the Q2, we established our fifth vertically integrated state-level operation in Ohio with a provisional medical retail license awarded by the Ohio Medical Marijuana Control Program. Construction began this summer, and the new location is expected to open in the Q4 of this year, subject to regulatory approval.
Establishing a retail presence in Ohio and becoming vertically integrated is expected to accelerate our path to profitability and turn around a business that historically has not been profitable. Additionally, we have secured a parcel of land adjacent to our facility, which provides additional expansion opportunities as we look to triple our cultivation area from 3,000 sq ft to 9,000 sq ft over time, pending regulatory approval.
With triple stacking, we should be able to adequately support a store base of 5, which is the limit in the state. We continue to explore and sign LOIs to grow our store base. Moving to slide 13. We expanded our West Coast retail network in the Q2 with the opening of Beyond Hello Grover Beach, California.
This store opening marks our third dispensary in the Golden State and is located in a thriving beach town that sees an annual tourist population of approximately 2.2 million.
Additionally, after the quarter, we reopened our Beyond Hello Palm Springs, California location with a reimagined design and in-store experience. Let's move to slide 14 for a discussion of our branded products expansion. In the second and Q3s of 2022, we debuted 2 new innovative product lines in Pennsylvania under our brand, The Lab. The first line is comprised of solventless live rosin extract products, including live rosin vape cartridges and jarred concentrates, a first of its kind in Pennsylvania. The product is formulated using premium flower and extracted using proprietary processes to preserve the integrity of the plant.
The second line is made up of live resin vape cartridges and concentrates produced using hydrocarbon extraction process, which uses high-quality, fresh-frozen cannabis.
Throughout 2023, The Lab solventless live rosin and hydrocarbon live resin lines are expected to be fully available across our footprint in Massachusetts, Nevada, Ohio, and Virginia, pending regulatory approvals.
Looking ahead in Pennsylvania, we expect to increase our profitability by diversifying our branded product offering and increasing penetration of our own branded products throughout our large dispensary network of 18 dispensaries, including the addition of many new strains under our brand, The Bank. An historic lack of strain diversity due to historic regulatory constraints caused us too often to have to mark down pricing in the first half of the year.
In addition, the very limited strain diversity and lack of hydrocarbon and solventless products limited the number of Jushi-branded products and thereby negatively impacted our vertical margin during the quarter as we needed to carry much more third-party products to satisfy patient demand.
Also, lost sales due to the vape recall and one-time discounting occurred following the reversal of the vape recall, where temporarily and unjustifiably recalled products were placed back onto our shelves as they approached their expiration dates and subsequently needed to be moved at expedited rates. With the regulatory change in December 2021, we are now producing many new strains, which has started to help drive SKU count and product diversity and ultimately expand vertical sell-through as well as wholesale potential.
In Massachusetts, we will be debuting a new line of infused chocolates under our Tasteology brand in September.
These cannabis-infused chocolates are made of 100% premium French chocolate and developed by a five-star pastry chef. Additionally, early in the Q4, we expect to launch newly reformulated cannabis-infused chews that are 100% vegan, gluten-free, and contain real fruit. In California, through a capital-light strategic partnership, we expect to launch several new and innovative Jushi-branded products to be exclusively sold at our Beyond Hello dispensaries in California.
These products are expected to increase gross margins at our California stores as we expect these to be our lowest price, highest volume, and highest margin products. We have also introduced third-party brand flower products as our house brands, which also should achieve the same financial goals as the above-mentioned Jushi-branded products.
Before I hand over the line, I am pleased to announce that just a couple of weeks ago, we officially transitioned to reporting issuer status in the United States. As mentioned earlier, with this transition, we have converted our financial reporting from IFRS to GAAP in accordance with SEC reporting requirements.
With our new status as a U.S. reporting issuer, we are well-positioned to take advantage of potential opportunities that could come with U.S. legislation changes surrounding cannabis, including the ability to up-list to a U.S. exchange, among other potential benefits related to capital funding and banking. In the meantime, we continue to focus on building a robust cannabis platform while simultaneously preparing to take advantage of these opportunities when they arise. With that, I'll now ask Jon Barack to review our financial results before we discuss our 2022 outlook. Jon Barack?
Thanks, Jim, and good morning, everyone.
Before getting started, I would like to remind everyone that the results I will be going over today can be found in our filed financial statements for the quarter ended June 30, 2022. As a reminder, all results are stated in U.S. dollars and are now prepared under U.S. GAAP. I'll now begin on slide 16.
As Jim previously mentioned, revenue in the Q2 of 2022 increased 52% to $73 million, compared to $48 million in the Q2 of 2021, and increased 18% from $62 million in the Q1 of 2022. Q2 retail revenue increased 16% to $67 million, and wholesale revenue increased 42% to $5 million, as compared to the Q1 of 2022.
The year-over-year increase was primarily attributable to our acquisitions in Massachusetts and Nevada and new Beyond Hello store openings in Pennsylvania and Virginia.
The quarter-over-quarter increase in revenue was driven primarily by our Nevada acquisitions in the first half of the year, an increase in wholesale and retail activity in Massachusetts, and retail sales growth in Illinois and Virginia. Moving to slide 17. Our gross profit was approximately $27 million in the Q2 of 2022, or 37% of revenue, as compared to approximately $19 million or 31% of revenue in Q1 2022. On an adjusted basis, Q2 2022 gross margin was 38% as compared to 40% in the Q1 of 2022.
Adjusted gross margin was negatively impacted by the under absorption of fixed costs at our GP facilities as we scale our wholesale business and increase promotional activity of Jushi-branded products in Pennsylvania. As Jim mentioned earlier, we reduced prices of certain Jushi-branded products in Pennsylvania due to limited genetics and the vape recall that was ultimately reversed. Operating expenses in Q2 2022 were approximately $39 million, or 53% of revenue, compared to approximately $37 million, or 60% of revenue in Q1 2022.
The approximate 700 basis point improvement in operating expenses as a percentage of revenue was primarily driven by managing labor and staffing expenses across the organization and lower share-based compensation. For the Q2 of 2022, Adjusted EBITDA was $0.5 million as compared to a loss of $0.9 million in the Q1 of 2022.
As Jim mentioned earlier, adjusted EBITDA growth was negatively impacted by infrastructure and headcount investments at our grower processors that continue to have a transitional impact as we continue to scale and slower than expected growth of our wholesale operations. Q2 net loss was $12 million or a loss of $0.15 per diluted share.
The net loss of $0.15 per diluted share in Q2 2022 was primarily due to the dilutive impact of the outstanding warrant derivative liability. Moving to the balance sheet on slide 18. We ended the Q2 with approximately $43 million of cash and cash equivalents on the balance sheet, compared to approximately $76 million at the end of the Q1.
The change in our cash position was driven primarily by cash CapEx, which year-to-date totals approximately $41 million, reflecting investments related to the expansion and optimization of our grower processor facilities in Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts, as well as the continued development of our retail store footprint.
The company also made income tax payments totaling approximately $7 million in the quarter. For the balance of the year, we expect CapEx to be in the range of approximately $15 million-$25 million prior to any potential TI reimbursements or financings, for a total of $55 million-$65 million for the full year 2022, subject to market conditions and regulatory changes. This will substantially complete our capital expenditure program to open new stores in Virginia and elsewhere, as well as to substantially grow our Pennsylvania and Virginia grower processor facilities.
We ended the quarter with $45 million in inventory, representing a $5 million improvement from the prior quarter, driven by operational improvements and inventory turnover. As of June thirtieth, 2022, we had approximately $200 million principal amount of total debt, excluding leases and PP&E financing obligations.
During the Q2, we drew down $25 million from our acquisition facility for the two Nevada acquisitions, resulting in current availability under the facility of $35 million, with the potential ability to increase the capacity of the facility by an incremental amount of up to $25 million.
Regarding our January 2023 secured notes maturity, we are currently in discussions with multiple lenders and are in the process of collecting and reviewing term sheets for the refinancing. Given the recent volatility in the capital markets, we are looking at different sources of financing in order to get the lowest cost of capital we can, including traditional mortgage debt, sale-leaseback financing on our unencumbered Manassas facility, as well as corporate term debt or new secured notes.
Additionally, and subject to lender approval, we could utilize available capacity under our acquisition facility to refinance debt. As of August 29, 2022, our issued and outstanding shares were approximately 196 million, and our fully diluted shares outstanding were approximately 291 million.
As pertains to the disclosure on our press release regarding our Q1 financials, we are currently working with our auditors to restate the period ended March 31, 2022 as soon as practicable.
While there is no impact on our year-to-date financials being discussed today, we believe there was a misclassification of cash flow items in our Q1 filing, principally related to accrued capital expenditures in our large Pennsylvania expansion project, though we believe it ultimately had no net effect on total change in cash during the period. We will obviously provide more detail when our auditors have finalized their procedures and the revised Q1 filing is completed. With that, I will now turn the call back to Jim to discuss our outlook for the remainder of 2022.
Thank you, Jon. Let's take a look at our outlook on slide 20. We are revising our Q4 2022 annualized revenue to be between $320-$350 million, with a target exit margin percentage of low double-digit Adjusted EBITDA.
While we face some of the same industry headwinds as our competitors, including a weak macro backdrop and certain regulatory delays, we believe our near-term margin growth is more of an internal execution challenge as we scale two large-scale plants simultaneously in Pennsylvania and Virginia and seek to become a substantial vertical operator by the Q4 and rolling into 2023. In 2022, we will have transformed the company from a substantially retail-only company selling mostly third-party products to a fully vertical company, with the exception of Illinois and California.
At the retail level, we expect to open three additional Beyond Hello stores in the next four months, including two locations in Virginia and one in Ohio. We are also moving an underperforming store in Pennsylvania.
Moreover, we will continue on adding additional operational grow rooms and expanding production at our grower processor facilities as we look to increase the sell-through rate of our own branded products through our network of retail stores, along with pursuing wholesale opportunities. By the end of 2022, we expect to have 40 retail licenses across seven markets, including approximately 37 operating retail locations and approximately 330,000 sq ft of cultivation and processing capabilities, including 100,000 sq ft of canopy. Jushi remains committed to long-term growth in 2023 and 2024.
Besides M&A bolt-on opportunities in Ohio retail and Illinois, Jushi has significant organic growth opportunities as the Virginia medical market matures from about a 0.5% penetration rate to a readily achievable 3% rate that we have seen in other states. With adult use sales pending in 2024 in Virginia and a potential opportunity for adult use sales in Pennsylvania in the not-too-distant future, we see Jushi as leading the pack in organic sales growth well beyond 2023.
The profitability growth story should also become well established as we become a more vertical company over the coming quarters and as we dial in our two large grower processor expansions in Virginia and Pennsylvania over the next 12 months.
Additionally, we hope to expand our grower processor in Virginia for adult use sales and continue to move several underperforming stores in Pennsylvania.
We believe we have created a solid foundation on which we can continue to execute against our core vision of creating a market-leading cannabis platform, and we will only work to strengthen this throughout the second half of the year and beyond. To reiterate, we remain committed to generating sustained long-term value for our shareholders, and I look forward to updating you all on the significant strides we expect to continue to make for the balance of the year.
As always, I would like to thank our dedicated team for all of their hard work. I am extremely proud of all we have accomplished so far this year, and I could not be more excited for what we will continue to achieve as a team.
With that, I would like to pass it back to the operator to open it up for questions. Operator?
Thank you.
We will now begin the question and answer session. If you have a question, please press zero one on your touchtone phone.
If you wish to be removed from the question queue, please press zero two. If you are using a speakerphone, you may need to pick up the handset first before pressing the numbers.
Once again, if you have a question, please press zero one on your touchtone phone.
We have a question from Bobby Burleson from Canaccord Genuity. Please go ahead.
Yeah, good morning.
Just wondering now that you guys have a pretty broad footprint in terms of state markets, you have this lower basket size you alluded to. Can you walk us through maybe some of the places where you've seen the biggest negative impact to basket size in terms of state market and maybe where basket size is kind of hanging in there?
Yeah. Thank you, Bobby. Basket size is hanging in there in Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. We've seen some degradation in Nevada and Massachusetts.
Okay. Great. Similarly, like just same-store sales growth stripping out what you guys are doing in terms of expanding your footprint, if you look at just the static market statistics year-on-year, quarter-on-quarter, whatever you guys have handy where are you seeing the most growth and the weakest growth environments?
Organic growth, ex the Nevada acquisition, was about 4%. That included same-store sales growth in Virginia, especially, a bit in Illinois, and then the wholesale business has grown as well.
Okay. Just one last one. The bolt-on acquisition opportunities that might be out there in this capital markets environment are smaller operators that aren't as well capitalized. Are they starting to capitulate a little bit in terms of what they think their worth is? Are you seeing more opportunities in that sense?
Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I mean, the valuations have come down quite dramatically in the private M&A market. There are single states where people have withdrawn selling assets because people like us are not even close to their expectations, substantially revised downward expectations. Yeah, so I think the sort of bolt-on type stuff where you're bringing on states definitely has gone down in terms of most companies' priority list. When I say companies, I mean the sort of public MSOs. What you have seen is an uptick in strategic dialogues among multi-state, whether private or whatever it is over the last 3-6 months.
The level of strategic activity on that level has never been as high as it is today.
Interesting. Okay. Thank you.
Our next question comes from Russell Stanley from B. Riley Securities. Please go ahead.
Good morning, and thank you for taking my question. Thanks for the color on the pickup in activity in Virginia since the July first rule change. I'm just looking at Virginia over the last few years added flower and eliminated the medical card. What other notable bottlenecks to patient count growth are there now, if any, beyond the macro headwinds, or is this otherwise a market that's just free to accelerate growth?
Listen, I think, thanks, Russell. Well, I would say there's shorter-term headwinds so we have to. We've done a really good job. The senior management, including myself, have really focused our team on getting Virginia right, knowing that that's a tremendous value opportunity in the near term.
Our stores, we transformed our stores to handle this volume in July, so we saw substantial uptick in July, even though our stores got overwhelmed by customer traffic, and there were lines. By August, we had much less of that. We had. It wasn't necessarily adding a lot of employees as much as getting procedures in place to deal with higher volumes. That was the first.
The second is product. We built product levels up in July to handle higher sales. We took a bet on that. We did some significant purchases in the wholesale market cleaning up anything that was out there.
We took a point of view. Now, I'm a Wall Street guy. I'm used to taking points of view. We took a point of view, and we bought whatever inventory we could. By August, we were in the higher, highest volume products, which are vapes and flower, including pre-rolls. We were at a week of inventory or less. In a market like Illinois or Pennsylvania, you're looking to carry about four weeks at sort of at a minimum.
We try to get it below that, but in reality, you'll run into shortages in certain areas if you're much below four weeks right now in those markets. Inventory levels are low, but the good news is our flower rooms now are coming down. Remember I said on the prepared remarks how we had a few week delay in our flower room.
That's just part of opening up a large-scale plant. The good news is one of our flower rooms had 100% passing rate on its product that came out of the flower room in terms of the testing, and the results were quite good in potency in the low- to mid-20s, which is great.
By the way, that is some of the highest testing flower in the state. The only higher testing flower than that is our own flower, which we brought down a couple months ago, brought to the market a couple months ago.
If we can continue to just take these grow rooms down and transform that product into commercial product, I believe that'll be the biggest bottleneck, along with getting our stores open. Now, we're getting the Fairfax open in a couple days. Again, these store openings are tremendous. i I'm going to give you an example. In Pennsylvania, our best performing medical store took six months to get to sort of a $3.5 million run rate. This is years ago, before there was much competition.
That store eventually got to almost a $20 million run rate of sales, annual run rate, before other stores opened up a little bit closer to it. In just a few weeks or a week or two, I don't know exactly, but we were at that $3.5 million level in Alexandria, Virginia, which is just tremendous if you think about that. If we can supply the stores, get our stores opened on time, the next one after Fairfax would be, Arlington
Arlington, which is in the middle of a city, by the way.
It should be a tremendous store. I mean, it could be one of the best in the nation in adult use format. But it cities tend to have a little bit more oversight and maybe red tape and those types of things. We hope to open that. It's scheduled to open in the Q4. And then we have another store that probably slips to the Q1 because we found out our potential landlord had refinanced with Bank of America, who doesn't prefer cannabis lenders.
Sure.
Bank of America seems to be kicking out cannabis customers on the verge of it getting to SAFE Banking Plus, another great move by Bank of America. That being aside, that was a great location, but we have three more I'm flying to see this week to choose a store in the area we want to be. Those will be getting the product taken down.
Getting it into the system will be the biggest growth driver. If we get all the product down, our sales projection, and we can sell it all, which I think we can, because we can always sell in the wholesale market, our sales, what we have in our model, will be exceeded for the Q4, I believe, in Virginia.
That's great color. Maybe if I could your comments around arlington you talked about the health service area that you're in, I think is home to 5 of the 10, 5 of the state's 10 most affluent neighborhoods. Just wondering what kind of demographic data you have on the patients coming through your stores, what you can say about them to the extent you can generalize.
This is Jon. I mean, I think just at a high level, I mean, the per capita income of Northern Virginia is about two to three times the average for other health service areas within the state. I think the demographics, I mean there's certain things we can track and certain things we can't track. I think our medical population is indicative of the you know the people who live in that area. We're excited about the growth potential there and you know that our health service area also has 29% of the population of the state, so it's in excess of its you know pro rata share, quote, unquote.
There are 2.5 million people in that health service area. From a patient potential medical patient population standpoint, it's a very significant opportunity.
Yeah. I would point out, too, that if you measure it by basket sizes, the basket sizes of Virginia are extremely high.
We've seen them as high as 150+.
Yeah. I think that I mean, that's the data we have is that if you're walking in and dropping that much in a basket, then that must mean you have some spare cash.
Great. That's excellent. Maybe one more and I'll get back in the queue. Just switching gears to Illinois, the state's finally issued the additional 185 retail licenses. Just wondering how that informs your strategy going forward from a standpoint of adding more retail and/or cultivation there to be vertically integrated forward. Thanks.
Yeah. I would say that we have Peoria, where we won a license. We're looking to open that up. We have multiple LOIs and leases behind the LOIs where we've done the work to find the location, which is maybe even more tricky than getting the LOIs these days, by the way. We've gotten given how prices have come down, there's a fair number of licenses to buy. We've gotten some good real estate there.
In terms of getting vertical there, which if you think about jushi it's a bit of nirvana because all of a sudden we look a lot like some of the larger MSOs, where we have three tremendous states Pennsylvania, Virginia, and then Illinois, that are big vertical states. Obviously, that's something that we've been very focused on. I would say the expectations over the years were highly inflated of people who owned Illinois assets, maybe for good reason. It's been a good performing state, and we chose not to play.
Now we see multiple strategic combinations that include Illinois with some privates, and also we have won a craft grow license, and we have a strategy, an alternative strategy to buy 2 more craft grows. We believe we can we have a way to virtually stack those licenses where we could supply 10 stores on our 10 stores at a nice vertical, a nice vertical story 50% to 60% of our own product or something in that neighborhood, and then have a small exposure, a very small exposure to the wholesale market. If you think about that's a pretty nice strategy, right?
Because I'm not sure you want to go big into vertical, wholesale at this point, if you're not there already. we we're liking our position there, and that opportunity is one of the sort of attractions for combinations, that we from Jushi's standpoint.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Pablo Zuanic from Cantor Fitzgerald. Please go ahead.
Hi, this is Matthew Baker on for Pablo Zuanic. Thank you for taking our questions.
Nice to see the pickup of new patients in Virginia in July, but how does the medical program now compare with other medical states in terms of the process of doctors getting registered and for new patients getting a prescription? We just want to understand how unique Virginia is after the change versus other states. Do you know roughly what the number of patients is now in Virginia, or is this something that we can't know if they're not getting registered?
Thank you.
Yeah. Jon Barack could comment if he has more detail, but I'll start. First of all, on the patient count, we mentioned, I mentioned in my prepared remarks that the penetration rate is 0.5%.
if you look at the 3% marker that's where penetration tends to get to at a pretty nice curve in places like Florida Arizona on its way to 4-4.5%, and Pennsylvania, which is a touch north of 3% now. Usually, there's a pretty good march up to that level in a medical market.
In my view, the timing of that march based upon what we see, in other words, going from 0.5%-3%, will be quicker now probably in any market. If you look what's happened in Missouri, for example, or Arkansas, these newer markets, they get to 3% pretty quickly.
Now there's less stores in Virginia, but we think that the march to Virginia, especially in our MSA, because we can deliver and we've set up our stores where we have a separate delivery vault, we have a third-party service coming in, as we speak to do delivery for us, which we think will accelerate that, by the way, a lower cost per transaction than we could do it ourselves.
We believe we'll be able to get to that 3% at a more accelerated rate than you've seen in states like Pennsylvania, which we're in. And that has to do with, I think, a lot of things.
One is the industry's gotten better, we've gotten better, but also it has to do with just the fact that cannabis, legal cannabis is so well-publicized now and people are looking for it. In terms of getting a patient prescription, so you don't require a card anymore in Pennsylvania, which is quite unique.
Virginia.
Excuse me, in Virginia, which is quite unique. That's great, right? I mean, that reduces the cost of getting into the program. In terms of conditions, qualifying conditions, I think it's probably as good as any state.
Yeah. The doctors can prescribe for anything that they see fit. There's no limitations on indications that qualify. The way the program works now is patients see a doctor, the doctor prescribes it, fills out the form for the patient who takes it directly to the dispensary, and they can get dispensed that day. So there's no regulatory bottleneck which had really been a hold-up for the program, given an understaffed regulator, until this July first period. People are still, you know.
As Jim mentioned, there was a huge influx in the beginning of July and through August for people who knew about it.
Now it's just as we open more stores and expand the footprint, it's getting people more aware of really how seamless the process is getting medicine these days.
Yeah, I mean, given our inventory levels that's been such a big uptick for us. Our inventory levels are low and there was a huge uptick coming into our stores. We haven't done any marketing at all. We've done nothing to stimulate demand in terms of getting the word out. Now, we started a small scale program with small dollars, again, given the product shortages just to get it out there and build that backlog going into the going through the Q4.
All right. Thank you. Just for a follow-up regarding Pennsylvania, both retail prices and wholesale prices are down, but are your retail gross margins up? Any color there would be helpful. I guess as another follow-up, if the MSOs are paying the $20 million fee in New York, do you think that could set a precedent for other states? For example, you might have to pay that fee in a market like Virginia. Do you think that's something that could happen? Just any color there is helpful. Thank you.
Sure. From Pennsylvania retail gross margin standpoint, we've been doing our best to hold the line there, so that the as a retailer, we don't get penalized for the what's been some margin compression and split that with our vendors who we buy from.
Again, we are a grower as well, but our bigger issue from a gross margin standpoint from our grower has a lot more to do with unabsorbed fixed costs and under-absorbed fixed costs as we expand rather than anything specific to the prices that we sell for.
As we bring our new grow rooms online, we'll have 4-5 times the product available and then be able to fully absorb our fixed costs and push the vertical margin through our own stores as we expand our shelf space with our private label brands. As for New York.
Well, I'll get to that in a second. I just want one other comment on that. In terms of the wholesale market, I'd like to point out that Jushi is a disruptor in Pennsylvania rather than an exposure a legacy exposure to wholesale.
If you sort of think of an MSO that's been there and benefited from very large prices, high prices, which are now coming down as their volumes remain somewhat flat that's not great. From a Jushi standpoint, we haven't participated in that to any great extent at all. I mean, small. We also are taking the-- we're pro. I believe we're the largest buyer of wholesale product, both in Pennsylvania and Virginia. By going-
Illinois.
Excuse me, Pennsylvania and Illinois. Likely Virginia, too, by the way. Pennsylvania and Illinois. As we feed our system it appears to us after a lot of knowledge in the industry and knowing people that people sell about 65% of their own products in their stores.
We've been at pathetic numbers because we don't have the product, and we had genetics. By the way, the genetic story is something that wasn't our story. We acquired this facility with this genetic pool. We got a great price, but we didn't realize it would take the regulator we had to beat the regulator over the head, basically, to get the genetics in.
That's something where we're a benefit. In terms of New know I'd like to point out that I lived in New York for 30 years. I now live in Florida since 2014. I happen to have been a latecomer. I've sort of voted with my feet, so to speak, and two ways. In the cannabis way, Jushi owned almost 20% of a license called Valley Agriceuticals, which got sold to Cresco Labs about when we went public in 2019. We were a bidder for that. We tapped out and turned into the seller. Those are two factoids about Jushi.
New York happens to be, along with California, in terms of any business, uniquely positioned to dissuade anybody from doing business. Tesla moved out of California.
They both happen to have gold mines buried in their states. One is in California, it's the technology industry, which generates huge amounts of revenue in terms of capital gains taxes. New York is obviously Wall Street historically. They happen to New York dissuaded traders from being in New York through regulatory. I've always thought New York to be not one of the worst regulators in the country as does California.
I don't think anything like that will occur in other states which are much more friendly to people who are trying to do legitimate businesses in their states.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Glenn Mattson from Ladenburg Thalmann. Please go ahead.
Yeah, hi. Can you just elaborate further on the guidance, and just thinking about the change from prior guidance? I guess top line reduces by not as significant necessarily as the bottom line. Just with cost-cutting measures underway, with you getting more vertical and just kind of think about what kind of pressures there are out there that are causing the reduction in the EBITDA guidance more so than the top line. Thanks.
Yeah. As you point out, the top line, we centered around the lower point of the range, which I think has been pretty similar to a lot of other reporting companies. In terms of the EBITDA margin I what I said in my prepared remarks different from other companies.
We are going from one grow room in Virginia, excuse me, to 7, and we're going from 4 grow rooms in Pennsylvania to 10. And that sounds like, okay, that's a lot of cultivation, but for everything you actually take down, then you need to process. The volume in those facilities are going way up.
The good news for our shareholders is that capital will have been spent this year, substantially spent. Anything we're spending next year is just paying invoices off from this year.
That's capital expenditures of this year, and it's done, including our retail build out, by the way. Our capital, huge capital investment program to grow the company, increase margins in the company, it will be done substantially by the end of the year. Bringing those up and getting to peak, if you talk to the top MSOs, which I have, remember, we're one of the biggest customers out there, and we're friendly with them, it takes 12 months to dial in these plants. For us I mean, that's a work in progress.
We will execute. The question is the timing of the execution. That's just us getting sort of more used to what it feels like to build out one of these facilities and then operate it and saying, "You know what? Let's be more conservative and maybe more realistic.
Great. That's very helpful.
On the refinancing, can you just talk about the challenges there? Like, is it more that the rates are above a level you're interested in paying, or is it just difficult to get the whole thing done? you talked about shifting to maybe using the acquisition facility or some other methods. Just a little more detail there. Thanks.
I'll turn it over to Jon to talk about this, but we've actually in the dog days of the summer July and August, we've had a tremendous, I think response to what we're doing given market conditions, of course, right? In that context, I think we have a lot of interest. The way we do things is to take things very, very seriously. We obviously don't pretend like the capital markets necessarily will improve, and there will be volatility in the sector. What we do is we're looking at everything across the spectrum, across the capital structure, and response has been really, really good.
We had a deal in place, which got too expensive for us given the capital markets how pathetic they were, particularly I think in, if I remember correctly, it was May and June.
Yeah
into July.
Yes.
July was the improvement, but yeah.
Yeah
May and June.
Yeah
Is when that sort of we pushed that off. Remembering our $75 million facility, which comes due was almost, I think, 100% shareholder based. In other words, everybody in that facility is a significant exposure to Jushi's equity. At that time we did that, the capital markets were also constrained, so there was 75% warrant coverage.
My hedge fund and myself, we were the biggest lender at that time, and a lot of other shareholders stepped up too. There were some newer folks who came in who held those warrant coverage. It's a different kinda facility than others and there's opportunity there in a sort of a worst case scenario.
Just adding to what Jim said the markets kind of fell out from the term sheet we had early summer. Basically summers it's slow to get people to do work, but we now have multiple term sheets have focused more on the unlevered Virginia asset as a source of levering at the lowest cost of capital and using that as the base for building the cash we need for the maturity.
I mean our Virginia facility is, we have $100 million into Virginia, including the license, and we haven't borrowed against that. Obviously, it's a a great state. We have a ton of strategic interest in that state. so it's obviously a great. I think I've said this before, I think publicly many times, but it's the best collateral in the whole business.
Great. Thanks for the color.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Ty Collin from Eight Capital. Please go ahead.
Hi. Thanks for taking my question, and congrats on the strong revenue growth in the quarter. Jim, I appreciate your commentary earlier in the call surrounding some of the consumer trends you're seeing.
You mentioned that you saw kind of smaller basket sizes being offset in part by new customers coming into your stores. I'm wondering if you could comment on where you're seeing those new customers coming from.
Is that sort of illicit market capture, share capture from some of your peers? I'd appreciate any incremental color there.
Yeah, I mean, I'll turn it over to Jon if he has more color. Yeah, we don't have clarity down to that. We don't you know poll people when they come in about. I would say that Pennsylvania medical market you know continues to you know slowly grow.
Maybe slower than we'd like you know when it hit the 3% level which seems to be the magic level where it slows down. Illinois you know you continue to have you know a very popular program, and we have some good stores.
Prices have come down in those states, which stimulates purchasing and new customers because you know for them it's if you're coming into the market and you buy illicit, it's you know at some point you go to the dispensaries, and that point tends to be not breakeven, but I believe you know again no data necessarily but above breakeven purchase, where you want to go in and get tested product, better product, and more variety.
You know and get away from an illicit market transaction, which may not be the most comfortable thing for a lot of you know a lot of our customers.
Just to add to that, I'll say Massachusetts is interesting. I think we've seen some of our highest numbers of patients. We're seeing incremental patients even as the basket sizes have come down, which, as Jim said, could very well be people who were formerly participating in the illicit market, who are now coming into the legal market as the pricing is matches or is much closer to black market pricing.
Yeah. I think, Ty, that the prices coming down that story being so negative, it does 100% stimulate demand. I mean, do we know exactly where that is? No. But I mean, it 100% does. That story being negative is know the people who have legacy businesses with big wholesale exposure and big vertical sell-throughs, right? Because as their volume increases, their prices are coming down. We don't have that. Again, we're more of a disruptor. We're later to the game on that.
Once they get through that, I think people will see it's a very good business, but they just have to get through that themselves.
A lot of them have new states opening up, and they will continue to have a flow of new states opening up like we have Virginia, so they'll have offsets to that. It'll get there eventually.
Got it. That's great color. Thanks for that. Just for my follow-up, hoping to get a little more color on the CapEx outlook. It looks like the full year guide did increase a little bit compared to what you put out last quarter. I'm wondering if you could speak to what changed there. Maybe if you could also touch on what you sort of think the CapEx investment will be in 2023 compared to 2022, given that it sounds like you've kinda got a lot of the heavy lifting done this year.
Yeah. Hey, this is Jon. I think the guide is $15-$25 for the rest of the year, and it really just has to do with the pace of the completion of the GP projects largely, which as Jim said will be substantially complete this year. Bits and pieces might fall into Q1, depending on the timing for regulatory approvals. I mean, it's you know. Some of these projects are phased from a regulatory approval standpoint, so until the regulator passes one part, we don't complete the next part.
That's part of the reason for the range, as well as the stores that we have, the entitlements that we have in hand that we're building out. How many do we get the sort of green light from the regulator to start working on this year in VA?
When do we get the lease signed for the sixth property, and then when do we get the building permit and the plans done and blah, blah. Does that fall on Q4 or Q1 next year? That's really the large reason for that range, which frankly isn't that big a range compared to the year, too the total year spend.
As far as 2023, I mean, we haven't guided to that yet, so I'm not going to give you a specific number. What's really hanging out there are those extra couple of stores. To the extent that there are regulatory changes, improvements, et cetera, in other states then the numbers they'll evolve. Ohio is an example of that. We have plans to expand there from our 3K canopy. Exactly how much we're going to expand there could change depending on certain bills that are out there that could get passed that could really increase the size of that canopy.
Yeah. I mean, in 2023, it's really just a tale of a few stores. Additionally, we've identified 3 more. We're already moving one in Pennsylvania, underperforming stores that you know we'd like to move, especially in anticipation of adult use likely in 2024, in my view. So that's something that we'll get to, but we don't have that lined up yet.
In other words, we don't have the new leases. We don't have regulatory approval in those 3 cases. It's pretty minor. We're really looking to take advantage of what we did in 2022 and 2021, and you know to you know and really sort of grow the company off of that.
The one exception to that will be capital market dependent is we could have a secondary expansion in Virginia. We're looking forward to the adult use market in the Q1 of 2024, which I'll remind people is already law. There's a cannabis regulator for the adult use market being set up, which takes control of the program in law July 1, 2023, so six months before. As things go along in Virginia and we get used to what we're operating and capital markets we'll be there. We'll look to do that.
We already submitted that for approval, but there's a process there that takes some time. Again, the three new stores in the VA, none of that is committed to or that close and all of it's somewhat capital market dependent.
Thank you. We have reached the end of the question and answer session.
I would like to turn the call over to Mr. Perlman for final remarks.
Thank you for joining us today. If you have any follow-up questions, please reach out to me at investors@jushi.com.
Thank you very much. Have a great day.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.