Company is High Tide. My name is Vahan Ajamian. I'm Capital Markets Advisor. I've been with the company since late 2020, so pushing on six years now. When I joined, we were about 30 stores across the country. Now we're at 228 with a long-term goal of getting to exceeding 350. In terms of the value proposition, as you can see, High Tide is a specialty leading retailer. We have cannabis stores or dispensaries across Canada. That's our main business, the vast majority of our revenue and EBITDA. The brand that we have on retail is called Canna Cabana. It's the widest footprint of any retail brand across the country at 228 locations. Our average store does about double the revenue of our peers in terms of revenue per store.
Our same store sales have increased 161% since October 2021, while the average operator during this period is actually down 7%. Our market share is 12% in Canada. If you exclude British Columbia, where we're stuck at the provincial cap of number of stores, we're actually at 14%. We have 2.65 million members of our loyalty plan for a country with about 40 million people across Canada. It's growing very quickly. 170,000 of which are ELITE members, so they actually pay to be ELITE members and shop in our store and get even more discounts. I'll touch on all this, just going over the highlights. Revenue per square foot is bigger than most retailers, be it Walmart, Target, et cetera. We've more than doubled our market share in Germany in the last two quarters since we made an acquisition there, which closed last September.
We're looking at further international opportunities, which of course I'll touch on. We have a very strong balance sheet, no maturities for a couple of years. We just announced on Monday a credit approval with the Bank of Montreal for CAD 40 million of credit facilities. I can tell you I've been personally working on this since November 2021. Finally, we got to the point where big five banks in Canada, many of them are interested and able to give us money despite the fact that we're a retailer and despite the fact that there's the cannabis stigma. In terms of valuation, despite all this record-breaking achievements we just reported on Monday, all these are Canadian dollars. Revenue was CAD 179 million for the quarter, all-time record. EBITDA was CAD 13.9 million, despite having three fewer days in the quarter with there being February.
Despite this performance, the stock trades only at 5.7 times the EBITDA annualized that we just reported and just under four times the EBITDA projected a year from now from the six or seven analysts that cover our stock. Really quickly in terms of the numbers, market cap is about CAD 283 million. These are all Canadian dollars. Stock trades 0.5 times revenue and just under six times EBITDA. We are free cash flow positive, having generated CAD 13 million over the past 12 months. You can see on the map there, we do have 228 stores now. The biggest concentrations are in Ontario and Alberta. Canna Cabana, that's our flagship. That's the vast majority of our revenue and EBITDA, that we have 228 locations, 2.65 million loyalty members, and growing.
If you look at the big picture of what's happening in terms of the big overall theme, we can see younger Canadians, especially the coveted 18-35 year-old males, are significantly drinking less alcohol. About 10 or so years ago in 2015, 88% of young males 18-35 were drinking alcohol. Now that's down to 78%. Similar downward trend for women, similar downward trend for older women and older men. In terms of dollars, you can see alcohol consumption last 12 months from StatCan data that just came out, Statistics Canada. Alcohol dollars are down, spirits are down, wines are down, cannabis is up 6%.
You look on the graph to the right there, unfortunately, this laser pointer doesn't work, if you were to look at cannabis and alcohol combined as an intoxicants market, cannabis was 13% share a couple of years ago, now it's 18% share. Cannabis is gaining share and we are gaining share in the faster-growing segment. In terms of the cannabis market across Canada, it's a CAD 5.7 billion industry nationally. It was legalized across the country federally in October 2018. A few years in, they already called it the best-performing new industry or new category in consumer product history, getting to CAD 3 billion within a year. Now it's almost six. In the five provinces where we operate, it's CAD 4.5 billion. That's the vast majority of the market that we're in. Those five provinces, industry sales are up 3% year-over-year.
In contrast, we're growing at 13%. In terms of cannabis formats, the vast majority of consumers prefer flower. They prefer smoking. Dry flower is about 1/3 , and pre-rolls are about 1/3 . Combined, whether it's rolled for you or you roll it yourself, it's about 2/3 of the product that we sell is dry flower. Vapes are second at 22%, and there's edibles, drinks, et cetera. Coming to our stores, Canna Cabana, we have a very friendly layout. I should say that the predecessor, Raj Grover, our President and CEO of the previous company that he ran, he ran smoke shops. He ran 19 different smoke shops, the largest chain across the country prior to legalization. He sold cannabis, or he sold consumption accessories to people who were consuming cannabis and other things.
Had the foresight to switch them over to become dispensaries, take it public, and build the biggest national chain. If you look at our stores, they're very inviting. You can see the glass showcases that we have. You can actually see the product. Each product has a card that describes not just the price, but the attributes of the product, what kind of terpenes it has, what kind of effect it may produce for consumers. You can see all around the walls, the four walls, it's all accessories. Accessories, again, because of the DNA of the company, that's where we started. We have 5,000 SKUs of accessories that we design, we contract manufacture overseas, and we retail. Those can be a significant profit enhancer for us.
About 4%- 5% of our store's sales are accessories, whereas for an average dispensary who doesn't really care about accessories, it's like 1%. Our target size is 1,200 sq ft- 1,500 sq ft. When legalization happened a few years ago, a lot of our competitors, they made these 3,000 sq ft or 4,000 sq ft stores, that cannabis buying was going to be an experience, and it was all going to be about the new consumer, the soccer moms, the investment bankers, the baby boomers were going to come and move the market.
We knew that wasn't the case. Because of what we had been selling to since 2009, cannabis consumers, obviously legally and only through accessories, we knew what makes them tick. Our bread-and-butter core consumer is 18 years-old to 40 years-old. They're blue collar. They smoke every day. They're price-conscious. They are a family income, them and the wife, et cetera.
It's about CAD 100,000 a year. Definitely price-conscious consumer. We sell to the soccer moms, we sell to the baby boomers, but they don't move the market. We'll get to that more shortly. In October 2021, in Las Vegas at the MJBiz conference, we announced the launch of our discount club model. Cabana Club, we called it, a discount club model where you walk into our stores, and you can see on the right there, every product you see, there's three different prices. There's the market price, so in this case, this ounce bag of blueberry sells in the market from our competitors for CAD 105. If you're a member, it's CAD 75. It's typically 10%- 25% cheaper if you're a member right here, right now, no cost.
As you can imagine, to save that kind of money, 90-plus % of our consumers sign up and become free members. Now, in accessories, where there is no middleman, and because it's our SKUs, we contract manufacture, we import them, we can provide 50%, 60%, up to 80% discounts and still make more money on the accessories in terms of percentage margin than we do on the cannabis because there's no middleman. It's all us. You can walk in, you can see this bong here, that on the market would sell for CAD 80. If you're a member, you could buy it for CAD 24. A year later, we came up with ELITE, which I'll get to in a second. You can see now, since October 2021, we're now up to 2.65 million members and growing, up 39%.
We've added 750,000 members across the country in the last 12 months. We launched a year later in November 2022, we launched ELITE. ELITE is the paid tier. We started off at CAD 30 a year. Because of the demand that we got, we actually increased it from CAD 30 to CAD 35. ELITE provides even greater discounts on all the products you buy every day, and especially flash sales. For example, let's say a new vaporizer product is CAD 300. Competitors can buy it for CAD 160 and retail it for CAD 300. Given our size and scale, we can buy it for CAD 140. We'll do something like buy 2,000 of these, very limited, about 10 per store. You have to be ELITE to buy it, and you can buy it for CAD 150.
If you're a consumer, I'm getting a CAD 300 product for CAD 150, limited time only, and I got to go out before it sells out. I got to be Elite. I paid for almost five years of annual fees for one product. We do things like this all the time with terms of half-price delivery, pre-birthday gift, birthday gift bag on your birthday, et cetera. Every year on 4/20, April 20, we give away CAD 100,000, and if you're ELITE, you automatically get the maximum number of entries. ELITE member in Toronto, I believe, won this year. It's going very well. As you can imagine, similar to other retailers, like Costco, for example. If I'm paying to shop in a store, I ain't going anywhere else. I'm buying more. We see our ELITE members, they shop more often. They have larger basket sizes.
They're much stickier customer. You can see ELITE starting from zero in 2022. We're now up to 178,000 members that pay us CAD 35 a year all up front. It's growing 84% year-over-year. In terms of the Canna Cabana and our ranking, you can see the red line is Canna Cabana. There was a third-party marketing company that did a survey late last year, and they said, "What brands are you aware of?" Canna Cabana, the red line, you can see consumers continuously being more and more aware of Canna Cabana, whereas a lot of our peers, many of which have filed for creditor protection along the way, they're generally trending lower. Customer loyalty, where do you shop more often? Canna Cabana, 16%, by far number one, double everybody else. Very impressive stat. What really excites us is this one. Where do you shop most often, daily users?
The daily users, 49% of which say, "We shop most often at Canna Cabana." That is the customer that we talk about. They smoke every day. They work at blue-collar jobs, very price-sensitive, et cetera. That's more than double any of our peers. Again, we sell to the soccer moms. We'll do three gummies a month. We'll sell to the investment bankers who'll do a joint every Friday. The guys that smoke and girls that smoke every single day, they come to Canna Cabana. They move the market. Same-store sales is something we're particularly proud of, probably my favorite slide in the presentation. In October 2021, when we announced the discount club model, as you can imagine, we are playing the volume game at a lower price. We don't just price match, we price beat, so within every X km of every store.
We told the market in 2021 in Vegas when we announced this that Given the fact that we're decreasing the percentage margin, we probably need about 45% increase in same-store sales to get to the point where we're gross margin dollars is flat. Anything above 45% would be additive to gross margin dollars. As you can see from the chart, we predicted that based on some pilots we had done at the time, it would take about six months for us to be about 45% same-store sales growth. The red line is our same-store sales growth chained monthly. You can see within six months, about April 2022, we were up 45%, which is exactly where we said we were going to be. Now if you keep going all the way up to March, we are up 161% in terms of same-store sales.
At the same time, if you look at the industry sales of the five provinces where we operate, the industry sales are up 35%, much, much less than our same-store sales. The fact is industry store counts have continued to even exceed that. We don't have same-store sales for every operator, but we have the average, and the average operator is down seven because there's more stores in terms of increases than there is dollars. The average operator is down seven while we are up in terms of same-store sales, 161%. We went a step further. On day one in October 2021, we had dropped the percentage gross margin to rock bottom. We started to generate the traffic, and over the pursuing four years, people, they sign up, they're members, they're ELITE, they're coming to the store.
We no longer have to be 20% cheaper than the next guy. We can be 10% cheaper than the next guy, and people are still coming. Over time, you got a perfect storm where the same-store sales are up 161%. Our gross margin percentage has tricked higher over this whole time, not all the way to where it was before, but close. Their stores are actually double now. We have 228 stores instead of about 100 when we launched this program. You put all that together, and we used to generate CAD 1 million or CAD 2 million of EBITDA a quarter, now we're generating CAD 12 million-CAD 14 million. In terms of our store economics, in Alberta, which is our headquarters are located and the second highest number of stores, we do 1.9 times the revenue of our peers on average in terms of revenue per store.
In Ontario, which is the biggest market and that's the focus of our expansion, we do 2.5 times the revenue of our peers on average. Across the country, we're doing about CAD 2.4 million of product sales, double again our peers at 1.2. Average cost to build a store, again, these are all Canadian dollars, about CAD 260,000 of hard CapEx, at about CAD 100,000 of working capital investments, mostly inventory, and they tend to pay themselves back roughly 10-12 months. Our market share, when we launched the discount club, it was about 4% or 5%. Now it's up to 12%. If you were to exclude British Columbia, where I mentioned we are at the cap of eight stores per province, we're actually at 14% and rising. Canadian dollar per square foot.
If you take the last quarter, which we just reported annualized, which has the three fewer days, and it's obviously punitive to annualize that, we're higher than Target, Walmart, Canadian Tire, et cetera. Our shrink rate is just 0.2%, very tight ship. G&A, only 4.2% of revenue. Inventory turns over 18-21 days on average. People always say, "What's the secret sauce?" "How is it you're doing so much better than everybody else?" In a market where a lot of our peers have gone bankrupt, have gone through creditor protection, et cetera. Really, I think there's three elements that are not particularly replicatable. The first is the discount club model. We have 2.65 million members. We have the whole system that's powered by our accessories. It's powered by scale. The second is the real estate strategy.
A lot of our competitors, particularly in Ontario. In the western provinces, generally speaking, depending on specific municipalities, you put up a cannabis store here, and you have zoning restrictions. Nobody can come 200 meters, 300 meters, 500 meters and open another store next to you. In Ontario, they didn't do it like that. The only restriction in Ontario is you have to be 150 meters from a school. You can have, and you do have situations where you have cannabis dispensaries literally next door or across the street from each other. As long as you're 150 meters away from a school, that's okay. We saw early on everybody wanted to be in the cool downtown areas, especially in Toronto. If any of you are familiar, Yonge Street, Queen Street, King Street, there was 36 stores on Queen Street.
We saw that and we were like, "We have no interest in participating in any of this." You're basically fighting to the death for one city block with three other guys on the same corner. We decided we were going to go more for the strip malls, the power centers in the suburbs. For example, next to a Costco, next to a Walmart. I drive seven, 10 km to get to my closest Costco, and if there's a cannabis store in that plaza, you're the only one there, and you're bringing in people from a radius of seven, 10 km. You're the only one. Much better economics than fighting to the death with three other guys for one city block. That 36 stores on Queen Street is now down to roughly 12.
I think if you look at these tier- 1 power centers, these great locations, the fact is we can get them given our relationships with our landlords. All the main big commercial landlords in Canada, SmartCentres, H&R, First Capital, et cetera, we have dozens of leases with them already. Every time a new tier- 1 spot opens up, we're basically the first call. They see how much money we have, they see our Nasdaq listing, they see the great relationship we have. No independent is getting these spots. We are getting them. The fact is, the third part of the secret sauce is just our experience. Again, our Founder, CEO, Raj Grover, has been selling legally to cannabis consumers, accessories initially, for over 15 years, since 2009. Our operations team is second to none.
We've been running the same team effectively in terms of the C-suite since I joined in 2020 and since we went public in very late 2018. White label. We have two of our own brands. One is the house brand, Cabana Cannabis Co., and the second one is Queen of Bud, which is a very differentiated female-forward brand, which we acquired for CAD 1 million about a year and change ago. We've already sold over CAD 8 million of it in terms of product. We partner with some of the best licensed producers across the country to make it for us. Right now, it's about 2% of our sales. Based on the acceleration we're providing, we're projecting to get to 20% in the longer term. Because they're our brands, we generally get 5%-7% higher gross margin on these products. Free cash flow.
In my past life, I used to cover small caps as an equity research analyst across all sorts of industries, and often the companies that I cover, I would say, "Why don't you make more money?" "Your EBITDA's not high enough." I'd frequently get the answer of, "Well, we're growing so fast, and if we were to slow down the growth, we'd make so much more money." You'd never see it never actually happens. We actually proved it. In early 2023, you can see here at the top chart, the blue bars, those are the new stores we're adding every year. Historically, we added 30- 40 new stores a year. In early 2023, the original plan was to add another 40 stores.
You may remember, coming out of COVID, there was a very difficult hangover in the market where we transitioned from a period of stocks only go up, money in the mail, 0% interest rates, getting paid to sit at home, to back to reality. It was a very difficult period for companies on the Nasdaq. What we said was, "Okay, we're going to transition this." The goal is not necessarily to add 40 stores this year. That's not what the investors are looking for. The focus is on cash, cash flows, cash sustainability. We said in 2023, our goal is to be the first cannabis company to be free cash flow positive. We set the goal to do that by the end of the year, calendar year 2023.
If you look at the bottom chart there, the third line, third bar, Q3 2023, that's the July quarter, five months ahead of schedule, we generated CAD 4 million of free cash flow. We opened 12 stores that year because those were sort of past the point of no return in terms of where they were in terms of construction. We really slowed the growth in that one year just to prove to investors, and we can see the continued positive free cash flow quarter-over-quarter, that you don't have to worry. Our existing base of, at the time, 180, 200 stores can generate free cash flow, and make enough to open, for the last few years, we've seen another 20, another 30 stores every single year internally. We're at the point where the machine is sort of feeding off itself.
We said to investors, "Okay, we've shown this now for about a year and a half, two years. You don't have to worry there's going to be a desperation financing to keep the lights on," as many of our peers, public and private, went bankrupt. We're going to re-accelerate growth, and that's what we've done. Long-term track record. You can see we just reported on Monday, two days ago, CAD 179 million of revenue and a record CAD 14 million of EBITDA. If you were to annualize that, the stock is trading roughly six times what we just did, never mind the obvious growth ahead. In terms of the current state and future state, this is obviously not guidance any particular year or quarter, but just an illustrative representation of what we want to do. On the brick-and-mortar side, to go from 228 stores to 350.
Our average revenue per store of CAD 2.8 million right now could get up to CAD 3 million. That gives you over CAD 1 billion of revenue, just from our stores in Canada alone. Adjusted EBITDA margin, we see a lot of room for upside, be it the ELITE continuing to grow, white label continuing to grow, and just operating leverage to get up to 12%. You can see our adjusted EBITDA has a clear path to get to the CAD 50 million right now to about CAD 125 million. Let's talk about Germany. As I mentioned, we did an acquisition there in September. A lot of our peers, both in Canada and the U.S., five years ago, they did big acquisitions, hundreds of millions of Canadian dollars because Europe was about to turn on five years ago and nothing happened. All they did was bleed money.
We didn't have any part of that. What we saw was in April 2024, the big turning point was medical cannabis. In Germany, it's all medical, obviously. Medical cannabis was descheduled, so now no longer being a narcotic, just a regular prescription medicine. That was the big turning point, April 2024. Germany is almost entirely an import market. There are three small growers, but 90%+ of the product that's consumed is imported. We sort of watched this over 2024. You can see in Q1 2024, before the change, it was about seven, eight tons a quarter imported. Now we're at 50. What really is good for us is the share of cannabis into Germany is roughly 53% from Canada. We're the biggest suppliers.
In terms of Canadian dollars, you can see for years and years, exporting medical cannabis from Canada to Germany was a niche CAD 25 million industry. Now it's a CAD 400 million industry. What we did in September, we closed the transaction. We bought 51% of Remexian. Remexian is an importer and wholesaler, so they import from Canada and around the world, and they sell to pharmacies and other distributors. What we really liked about it was they're similar to us in that we are the lowest cost in Canada. They're the lowest cost in Germany. They have the same sort of overall culture and approach. What we liked is they're only roughly 30%-odd importing from Canada at the time, where the market is higher than that, about 53%.
We sat there and said, we talked to our licensed producers, and we said, "We're doing CAD 25 million of revenue with you a year, CAD 15 million with you, CAD 40 million with you. If you want to send 10%, 12%, 15% of your production to Germany, that's fine. All we ask is you sell it through us. We're your biggest customer. We're your biggest partner. We have a great track record. You don't have to worry about us stiffing you for payment, rather than working with some random German distributor that there's no track record with." A lot of them have said yes. We actually put out a press release today naming a bunch of the brands that have gone exclusive with us. We acquired 51% of Remexian. The strategy is very simple. They stay super incentivized. They are boots on the ground.
They sell to hundreds of pharmacies. We'll give you more product from Canada at best-in-class terms. You keep selling it to hundreds more pharmacies. You can see in six months, the tonnage into Germany, because of our relationships, has gone up from 85% to now 7.6 tons. Our market share in Germany has gone from 6.5% when we acquired this company to over 14% in just two quarters. It's been a smashing success. We are looking at other markets in Europe. We are looking to United States given the regulatory backdrop, but there's less than a minute left, so I will pause there. Sure. One question.
What percentage of cannabis in Canada or indeed anywhere else is sold online currently? Before you answer the question, the reason I ask this question in context, one of my concerns with the business model of High Tide is that it appears to be solely based as a bricks-and-mortar retailer. We all know in this day and age that could be vulnerable to sell online.
Point definitely taken. In terms of the cannabis market, I can say that for us, and I believe the industry, it's less than 5% is delivery. We offer delivery. It's been in larger markets, Calgary, Toronto, et cetera. I can give you anecdotal example. There's been alcohol delivery my whole life. I've never ordered it. Things like cannabis and alcohol, consumers are used to going to the store on the way home from work. I need some for tonight. People are coming over. I'm having a party, et cetera. There's also other structural friction in delivery where we can't outsource it to Uber Eats, for example. It has to be a licensed employee of the store who leaves from the store to your house to deliver it.
Unlike an Amazon package where we can just leave a box of socks on your doorstep, you can't do that with a regulated product. The person has to be home. It has to be the same person. The ID has to match, et cetera. It's less than 5% of our business. We provide it. Most people are used to buying a bottle of vodka or cannabis on the way home from work.
Yes.
We provide it to the extent it's there. If you're ELITE, it's half-price delivery.