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Earnings Call: Q3 2021

Nov 16, 2021

Operator

Good morning, and welcome to today's conference call to discuss Greenlane Holdings third quarter 2021 financial results. A press release detailing the financial results for the quarter was distributed yesterday afternoon and is available on the investor relations section of the Greenlane website at investor.gnln.com. As a reminder, today's conference is being recorded. A replay of this call, as well as a copy of the supplemental earnings slides, will be archived on the company's IR website at investor.gnln.com. On the call today are Nick Kovacevich, Chief Executive Officer, and Bill Mote, Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, Greenlane would like to remind listeners that today's prepared remarks may contain forward-looking statements, and management may make additional forward-looking statements in response to the questions received. These statements do not guarantee future performance and therefore undue reliance should not be placed upon them.

These statements are based on current expectations of the company's management and involve inherent risks and uncertainties and other factors discussed in today's press release. This call also contains time-sensitive information that speaks only as of the date of this live broadcast, November 16, 2021. Factors that could cause Greenlane's results to differ materially are set forth in yesterday's press release and in Greenlane's annual report on Form 10-K and quarterly reports on Form 10-Q filed with the SEC. Any forward-looking statements made today on this call are based on assumptions as of today, and Greenlane assumes no obligation to update these statements as a result of new information or future events. During today's call, Greenlane management may discuss non-GAAP financial measures, including adjusted net loss, adjusted gross profit, and adjusted EBITDA.

Nick Kovacevich
CEO, Greenlane Holdings

Good morning, everyone. It's good to be finally speaking with all of you on an earnings call after the merger with KushCo. As this will be my first quarterly call as the CEO of Greenlane, I'd like to thank all of you for joining us today, and I'd like to thank the entire Greenlane team for their incredible work during a truly transformative quarter for the company. We are excited today to share our progress made during Q3 and, more importantly, to update you on our integration, growth strategy, and near-term outlook for a successful future as the industry's leading ancillary cannabis company and house of brands.

Our first few months as a combined company have been off to a strong and encouraging start, demonstrated through several realized revenue and cost-saving synergies, including the consolidation of certain vendors and infrastructure, as well as the development of go-to-market cross-selling strategies across each of our respective platforms. We are extremely pleased with the integration milestones we have achieved thus far while simultaneously driving meaningful progression in the business. I'll begin my prepared remarks today by providing an in-depth overview of our strategy before providing some comments around our outlook and then finishing off with a quick review of our Q3 highlights. After that, I'll turn the call over to Bill Mote, our Chief Financial Officer, for a more comprehensive review of our Q3 financial results before we then open it up for Q&A.

With that, let’s move to slide three of the supplemental earnings slides, which you can find on our IR website if you haven't downloaded them already. Before we discuss our strategy and outlook going forward, it's important to look at our business in two different but complementary lenses as seen here on slide three. The first is the consumer goods side of the house, which is focused on serving consumers across wholesale, retail, and e-commerce operations through both our proprietary brands like Eyce, Vibes, Marley Natural, Keith Haring, and Higher Standards, as well as lifestyle products and accessories from leading brands like PAX, Storz & Bickel, Grenco Science, and many more. I'll be spending the bulk of my prepared remarks today talking about this unit as it forms a central part of our growth strategy, especially as it relates to scaling our own portfolio of higher-margin proprietary-owned brands.

On the other side, we have our industrial goods unit, which is focused on serving the premier brands, operators, and retailers through our wholesale operations by providing ancillary products essential to their growth, such as customizable packaging and vaporization solutions, and including our own house-branded products under the Pollen Gear label. Going forward, we will be creating two segments for these units so that we can report financial figures that can help you track our overall progress and performance of our business in a better fashion. For now, will be providing this slide and framework to help you conceptualize these two main parts of our business, which are roughly equal in sales today. With that context in place, let's turn to slide four, where we focus on our core part of our consumer goods business, our brands.

I'll spend just a quick moment providing a snapshot of our brands before ultimately covering our growth strategy on slide five. Over the past couple of years, we have been gradually shifting our business away from selling purely third-party products to developing and growing our own portfolio of proprietary brands. It's easy to see how this strategy helps us scale our revenue and become more in control of our own destiny, not to mention making us stickier with our customers. A big part that is often overlooked, and that we wish to emphasize, is that having your own brands means you can enjoy much higher margins than you would otherwise. Our in-house brands command double or even triple the gross margins of any third-party products we sell, with some brands, such as Eyce and VIBES, offering gross margins north of 50%.

It's no wonder that we have set our sights on growing our house of brands, both organically and inorganically, and in turn, enhancing margins and ultimately driving higher profitability for our shareholders. To better understand how attractive the strategy is, let's turn to slide five. I've touched on some of the reasons for why it makes sense to ship the branded goods, such as higher revenue and margins, but that's not all. Here are the four main reasons, or pillars, for why we are pursuing this strategy, and I'll now spend a few moments going over each. Pillar number one. Building a house of brands expands our strategic moat. It creates defensibility by enhancing our intellectual property portfolio as we develop new product lines for the brands we own and assume the IP of the brands we acquire.

In addition, it makes us stickier with our customers, as once they experience success with our brands, they cannot buy them anywhere else but through us. On top of that, we are afforded significant cross-selling opportunities because of this strategy. Over the past 8 months, we have talked in great length about the strategic benefits of the KushCo merger, and one of the key benefits is being able to sell our brands into KushCo's customer base of vertically integrated SSOs and MSOs, which today we estimate to be between 500-1,000 retail doors across the U.S. As those doors continue to grow and we penetrate these customers even further, we can cross-sell additional products from additional brands in our portfolio, helping us become a one-stop shop for all these customers' ancillary consumer goods needs. Finally, this strategy provides economies of scale.

As the more products we sell, the more bargaining power we have with our vendors and are able to negotiate better prices, which should translate to higher margins and for more cost savings for our customers. If we are just a distributor of third-party products, we can't go very far. By developing, launching, and acquiring our own brands, we create significant brand value and defensibility. Pillar number two, which I have touched on already, is that this strategy allows for higher revenue streams and significantly stronger margins. This will be a key pathway for us in our pursuit of profitability, and from there, it will allow us to generate stronger returns for our shareholders. Pillar number three is that we can continue to scale across the globe without requiring any significant catalyst, such as federal legalization.

Unlike the multi-state operators, we can ship our products nationally and globally, and we can scale faster and wider. We don't have the same interstate restrictions that they do because we're non-plant touching, and this creates a window of opportunity for us to scale quickly and to build a formidable position for when federal legalization gets passed and implemented, which could take several more years. Lastly, the fourth pillar why this strategy makes so much sense is that we are building the only true ancillary house of brands in the industry. If you look at the MSOs, there's stiff competition amongst a number of players who are all more or less competing for the same prize, building a house of brands on the plant-touching side. However, on the ancillary side, where we play, those same dynamics don't exist.

It's much more of a fragmented space, with the players focused on a particular subset of each category. To our knowledge, virtually no one else is creating a true house of brands on the ancillary side, and certainly, no one is doing it at the scale that we are. Our mission is to elevate all elements of the consumption experience. While having the plant-touching CPG products is obviously important for our industry, so is having all of the products and accessories needed to enjoy those cannabis products, which we see as a clear opportunity for Greenlane to own. As we continue growing our house of brands and the higher margins it contributes to our overall business, we benefit from the deep and long-standing relationships we have cultivated over the past 15 years with many of the industry's leading brands.

We believe we have a clear competitive advantage in working with top and up-and-coming brands throughout their life cycle and have developed significant market and consumer intelligence, which provides us unique insights into which brands to potentially acquire when we're looking in the future. Looking ahead, we will continue to build our portfolio of top ancillary CPG brands, as seen by our recent announcement to acquire leading vaporizer brand DaVinci, shown here in slide 6. I want to spend a couple of minutes talking about the acquisition, as there appears to have been some confusion when we announced the deal, perhaps somewhat due to the price and maybe even to a larger extent around the PACT Act rules, which were recently finalized and implemented.

First off, the team at DaVinci has done a strong performance pushing the envelope when it comes to innovation, which has helped the brand's product lines grow tremendously since the launch of their award-winning IQ vaporizer back in 2016. A track record that we definitely look to expand upon once the acquisition closes sometime here in Q4. In fact, the brand is looking to close the year at approximately $12 million in sales with margins of 60%. That's right, gross margins of 60%. The consideration for the acquisition is both cash and stock, and includes a number of earn-outs tied to the performance benchmarks that the DaVinci team must meet in order for the total purchase price to hit the cap of $20 million.

You're looking at roughly 1.7 times sales at the high end for a fast-growing vaporizer brand with proprietary and patented technology that commands upwards of 60% product margins. Of course, if they don't achieve the performance benchmarks, we will end up paying less than the $20 million. But if the business performs as well as we expect and the DaVinci team achieves the performance benchmarks, then we would expect that to translate into improved revenue and margins for Greenlane, which should then translate to a higher stock price and therefore less stock being issued as part of the total compensation. A scenario that we believe creates great alignment of interests.

Secondly, there have been some additional interest in our rationale for the DaVinci acquisition, given the recent PACT Act developments, which, among other provisions, ban the mailing of electronic nicotine delivery systems, or ENDS, via USPS and have led to other shipping restrictions by private carriers. Contrary to maybe your first impression, these rules do not have a significant impact on Greenlane. The final PACT Act rules do not apply to products that are used only for dry herbs or solid concentrates, such as the DaVinci vaporizer, Smoore and Storz & Bickel Volcano, and a variety of other products in our portfolio that, in aggregate, make up the vast majority of our consumer goods sales.

Additionally, Greenlane's robust compliance infrastructure and operational expertise enable us to continue delivering products that are PACT Act regulated to customers efficiently, creating a competitive advantage that we believe smaller companies will not be able to leverage. From a logistics standpoint, we have the scale to work with alternative non-UPS and FedEx carriers. If we remove the PACT Act-affected items in our business for sales orders under $4,000, which is the threshold for shipping via freight and LTL, which is not impacted by the PACT Act, the overall business impact to our business is only a couple million dollars or less than 5% of total sales for the entire year.

To sum it all up, for the small areas of our business that are affected, Greenlane is already compliant with all the PACT Act rules and actually has an advantage due to our regulatory knowledge, industry relationships, expertise, and scale. I'm happy to take any questions on DaVinci or the PACT Act in our Q&A session, but I want to now wrap up my discussion on our house of brands strategy by looking at slide seven, where we will provide an outlook for our business in 2022 and 2023. With our current portfolio of brands, including DaVinci, which we expect will close here in Q4, we believe that with just organic growth alone, we can achieve $70 million in Greenlane brands revenue in 2022 and over $100 million in Greenlane brands revenue in 2023.

This is an aspirational target that we believe we can achieve and does not take into account any additional acquisitions we may make to strengthen our product portfolio even further. We expect gross margins from this portion of our business to be over 45%, which should help elevate our overall gross margins as we continue to grow our portfolio and as it comprises a larger part of the overall business. To that point, we're expecting our Greenlane brands revenue to make up about 22%-28% of total revenue next year. Of course, our Greenlane brands are not our entire business. As mentioned at the onset, we also have another side of our business, the industrial goods side, where we have great relationships with many leading operators and brands that complement our consumer goods side of the house.

Slide eight puts this all into perspective by highlighting our breadth, strategy, and opportunity, particularly with the MSOs, who are continuing to rapidly scale and consolidate the cannabis industry. Not only do we have strong customer relationships, but we also have very strong vendor relationships as well, especially with CCELL, who we have been actively working with to block the importation of vaping products that infringe upon its parent company, Smoore's intellectual property. Last month, we issued a joint press release with Smoore and Jupiter highlighting our support of a complaint filed by Smoore with the International Trade Commission to defend against certain IP violations of CCELL's branded vape products. Just last week, the ITC announced it has initiated an investigation of the alleged infringers, as requested by Smoore.

In recent years, several vape manufacturers, brands, and retailers have produced and distributed products that infringe upon CCELL's patent and trademark rights. The CCELL brand has become synonymous with premium closed-end vaporizers, and many violators have been producing copycat and inferior products, hoping to ride the wave of CCELL's growth and prestige. These violations not only violate CCELL's IP, but some are also potentially endangering the health of the consumer by pretending to have the same rigorous quality standards of CCELL. We expect the ITC action and other IP enforcement efforts will create more awareness and action that will ultimately prompt regulatory authorities to clamp down on these alleged IP infringers, which should ultimately bring more business back our way.

Now, with that deep dive of our consumer and industrial goods units, let's quickly turn to slide 9 for a brief highlight of our Q3 results before I pass the call to Bill. Q3 was a transformational quarter for Greenlane. Total revenue increased 16% to $41.3 million compared to $35.8 million for Q3 2020. Our Greenlane brands experienced another strong quarter of growth, with sales increasing 26% to $8.4 million in Q3 2021 compared to $6.7 million in Q3 2020. This strong quarter of sales for our Greenlane brands, despite the normal and expected challenges of closing a merger, still represented the second highest quarterly revenue contribution in company history.

Most importantly, in Q3 we completed our transformative merger with KushCo, combining two robust, innovative companies into one ancillary powerhouse with a best-in-class product portfolio and a leading house of brands. In addition to our differentiated and complementary product offerings, we also brought together two distinct customer bases, collectively serving a much broader market than either company could have done alone. Greenlane today serves a premier group of customers, including 22 of the top 25 MSOs, according to the publicly traded revenue tracker on New Cannabis Ventures, and many of the leading Canadian LPs, the top smoke shops in the United States, and millions of direct consumers worldwide. Overall, Significant developments occurred in Q3, but we are highly encouraged about the position we are in and the massive opportunity within our reach.

We will continue seeking to acquire leading brands, such as DaVinci, that we believe can strengthen our product portfolio, make us stickier with our customers, and drive higher gross margins. We have a long road ahead of us to get this business to where we believe it can be, but we have a solid roadmap in place for getting us to that next echelon of growth. Q3 was transformative for the company and for our strategic initiatives that we are putting in place in Q4 and will continue our positive forward momentum well into next year. With our enhanced operations, customer base, and product portfolio, we are in a stronger position than ever to execute on our growth strategy and drive significant value for our customers, partners, and shareholders.

With that, I will now turn the call over to Bill to run through the financial results in further detail.

Bill Mote
CFO, Greenlane Holdings

Thanks, Nick, and hello, everyone. We are excited to be reporting our financial results for the first time as a combined company. As a reminder, the results I will be reviewing for you this morning can be found in our earnings release that is available on EDGAR and the investor relations section of our website at investor.gnln.com. Turning now to slide 10, net sales of Greenlane brands grew 26% to $8.4 million for the quarter, making up approximately 20.4% of total net sales for Q3 2021, up 210 basis points from 18.7% of total net sales for Q3 2020. Greenlane brands revenue comprised 29.3% of the total pre-merger Greenlane revenue, up from 25.9% last quarter.

As Nick mentioned, we expect Greenlane brands revenue to continue to rise and ultimately make up roughly 22%-28% of our net sales in 2022. Total revenue grew 16% to $41.3 million in Q3 2021 from $35.8 million in Q3 2020. Our United States segment net sales increased 29.4% to $37.5 million for Q3 2021 from $29.0 million in Q3 2020. The year-over-year increase of $8.4 million, or 29.4%, was due to a $12.2 million, or 304.9% increase in C&I, or industrial goods sales, driven by KushCo's September sales, which mitigated a decline in e-commerce channel and dropship in B2B sales.

We, along with many other importers of goods, are continuing to experience supply chain issues for both Greenlane brands and other top-selling brands due to record shipment backlogs and container shortages. These challenges have resulted in higher freight costs that we have been absorbing for some time, but are now passing through to our customers through a freight surcharge until there is a normalization of prices. In addition to impacting our margins, the shipping delays are also impacting revenue to a degree as it is taking longer to source products from overseas. We are continuing to monitor our supply chain activities and are making regular adjustments to our purchasing to meet any anticipated changes in demand and product availability. Our Canadian segment reported revenues of approximately CAD 1 million for Q3 2021, compared to approximately CAD 4.4 million in Q3 2020.

The decline in sales was due to an expected decrease in nicotine revenue sales as a result of our strategic shift away from low margin nicotine sales. In Europe, sales grew 21% year-over-year to $2.8 million, primarily due to an increase in B2B and third party marketplace website sales. Europe remains an exciting growth avenue for us, especially longer term, as more countries continue to warm up to legalization like the states have done over the past 5 years. Shifting gears, we'll now take a look at gross profit, which was $0.1 million or 0.3% of net sales in Q3 2021, compared to $2.5 million or 6.9% of net sales in Q3 2020.

As we announced via press release on November 3, a one-time inventory rationalization of $8.7 million was implemented in connection with the closing of the KushCo merger, which adversely impacted gross profit. Therefore, on an adjusted basis, removing the effects of this rationalization, gross profit was $8.8 million, or approximately 21% of sales in Q3 2021. The inventory right sizing initiative will facilitate a more efficient warehousing operation and will allow us to reallocate resources to higher margin top performing SKUs such as our Greenlane brands. It will also allow us to eliminate redundancies between our combined product portfolios. Our SKU count is getting tighter and we are becoming more judicious with our working capital, especially in light of the global supply challenges I mentioned earlier.

We're excited that we can not only streamline the business through this initiative, but also generate some cash in a non-dilutive way by selling inventory that can fund our organic and inorganic growth initiatives such as the DaVinci acquisition. We expect our overall gross margin to continue to improve as we execute on our strategic vision with a heightened focus on our Greenlane brands. G&A costs for Q3 2021 increased to $15.4 million compared to $10.7 million in Q3 2020, primarily due to an increase in M&A expenses incurred with respect to the KushCo merger. Net loss attributable to Greenlane for Q3 2021 was $16.3 million, compared to $4.5 million in Q3 2020. Adjusted EBITDA was negative $6.9 million in Q3 2021, compared to negative $6.3 million in Q3 2020.

We ended the quarter with $13.2 million in cash and working capital of $70.8 million, compared to $54.2 million as of December 31st, 2020. We're continuing to be judicious with our cash position and our ability to opportunistically raise capital under our ATM program. We're being very thoughtful about how we use our balance sheet to fund our growth initiatives. We're very excited about having the Eyce and DaVinci teams on the Greenlane team. The Eyce acquisition has been well received and is creating positive value for the company, as we expect the DaVinci acquisition will as well. We will continue to evaluate acquisitions with a similar profile for potential future targets.

With the improvements in our operational performance following our recent merger, we believe this pivotal year has positioned us for a strong 2022, and we are more excited than ever about the future for Greenlane. With that, I will turn over the call to the operator and open it up for Q&A.

Harrison Vivas
Research Associate, Cowen and Company

Great. Thank you. Hi team. This is Harrison Vivas on for Vivian today. So just wanted to start on the integration. Apologies for the baseball reference here, but what inning do you think you're in terms of completing the integration and how should we think about, the timing to achieving the full benefits of the merger?

Bill Mote
CFO, Greenlane Holdings

Just before we answer that question, I just want to make everyone aware of a transcription error on our non-GAAP reconciliation tables at the end of our earnings release, which we identified after the release crossed the wires. The correct release was filed on our 8-K, but incorrectly transcribed when you look at the version on our IR website, and we are working to resolve this as quickly as possible. To set the matter straight, please view the release in our 8-K or the PDF version on our website, which reflects the correct adjusted EBITDA number of -$6.9 million. Now with that, I can answer your question. Integration wise, we started this integration six months before the project closed, before the deal closed with uh-

With KushCo, I'd say we're in the middle of it. I don't know if it's the fifth inning or the sixth inning, but we're in the middle of the overall integration. We've made good progress. We're close to realizing our 100-day deliverables, and we continue to move forward. As we announced the savings of $15 million to $20 million over a 24-month period. We did envision that integration work would take some time to wrap up. The bulk of those savings will be achieved in this first 12 months of the project. I'd say we're in the middle of it, and we're progressing well, and just about coming up on our 100-day deliverables.

Harrison Vivas
Research Associate, Cowen and Company

Great. Thank you. Then, Following up on that $15 million-$20 million cost savings target, in the early stages, have you identified any opportunities for incremental cost savings? Bill, I know you talked about gross margin increasing from here, though we're also in the middle of a cost-inflationary environment, you know. Can you just kind of talk about the balance between potential incremental cost savings and how you're thinking about gross margin going forward?

Bill Mote
CFO, Greenlane Holdings

Gross margin changes are driven by product mix. We continue to increase the overall mix of our branded products, and that will continue. That's where we believe the gross margin increases. As we said in our call, we're charging some surcharges for freight to try to offset the impact of the logistics challenges that we're seeing in the marketplace. On a previous call, I'd said that Logistics challenges can impact margins by 200 to 300 basis points.. We are doing some things to change freight pricing so we can add those surcharges. And those surcharges have already been implemented. We're doing our best to offset freight related costs while continuing to change the mix.

If you recall on the call, Q2, I think, on a pre-merger basis, our brands were at about 25% of our overall revenue, and now they're about 29% from the pre-merger Greenlane side. That percentage you'll notice is going to adjust downward given that we're bringing on the revenue streams from KushCo. Overall, that revenue number will continue to go up as we continue to transition to branded goods and add companies like DaVinci into the mix.

Harrison Vivas
Research Associate, Cowen and Company

Understood. Last one for me. Can you maybe you have discussed the cross-selling opportunity. Just as we think about further revenue opportunities, can you maybe dimensionalize or quantify a little bit further, the opportunity that lies ahead of you in terms of selling across, the KushCo legacy platforms and the Greenlane platforms? Thank you very much.

Nick Kovacevich
CEO, Greenlane Holdings

Sure.

Yeah, I can take that one. Yeah. Look, I think, this is one of the primary reasons for the merger. One of the main reasons is to leverage the cross-selling. We're very excited now that we're developing this house of brands, which has been underway, but we're putting more of an emphasis on it. We're going to have a really robust portfolio of company-owned brands on the consumer goods side to offer to the vertically integrated MSOs and single-state operators that KushCo and our industrial goods division today is currently catering to. We haven't had that opportunity before. Typically with the industrial goods business, will be a little bit more competitive selling the C&I products, the packaging products, the energy products such as ethanol and butane. Margins will be lower.

These are very large customers. It's highly recurring revenue that we can recognize and obviously gets much bigger over time as these MSOs and SSOs scale and grow their overall revenue. That's what we're tapping into here, and we're able to then leverage that business, which is a great business, but it has a negative of being a little bit lower margin. We're able to turn that negative into a positive by cross-selling into those retail channels. Those same vertically integrated operators also have their own footprint of retail stores, and by getting our company-owned brand consumer goods into those retail stores, we're going to effectively raise the overall gross margin profile of those customers. It really allows us the opportunity to fill a void in the market.

Today, a lot of cannabis retailers have not taken advantage of offering accessories through their retail stores. They've got consumers walking in every day. Some stores are getting hundreds of consumers on a daily basis, and for the most part, they're just purchasing cannabis. Our goal is to make sure that these MSOs and SSOs have an opportunity to upsell their customer into accessories as well, whether it's a simple, rolling paper, our VIBES papers, grinders, our Aerospaced grinders, or if it's something much more robust like our own DaVinci products or some of our partner products like PAX, Storz & Bickel, or Grenco Science, right? That's the goal. It's well underway. We have the relationships, and now it's just about navigating.

We're seeing a lot of the MSOs just now starting to move to more central buying for those retail products, whereas historically, it's been one-off store managers making individual buys. As they're looking to get more efficient with their retail business, they're starting to consolidate their purchasing. It's really perfect timing for us to have these conversations and to be able to offer this solution. Over the next few years, we expect to convert

A significant amount of our customer base into carrying these goods, and will be able to convert a significant amount of the consumer base from going to a separate smoke shop or specialty retailer to buy their accessories and allow that consumer to buy everything all at once when they go to purchase their cannabis from a licensed legal dispensary outlet.

Harrison Vivas
Research Associate, Cowen and Company

Great. Really appreciate it. Thanks for taking the questions. I'll jump back in the queue.

Nick Kovacevich
CEO, Greenlane Holdings

Thank you.

Aaron Gray
Managing Director and Head of Consumer and Cannabis Research, Alliance Global Partners

Hi, good morning, and thanks for the questions. First question, for me, just want to go into, and you're just obviously highlighting, our own brands and a lot of opportunity there. But just on the third-party brands, one of your third-party brands, Storz & Bickel, called out in their public call, via Canopy, some supply logistics and challenges that caused, global supply difficulties. It was down 34% quarter-over-quarter. Just want to know if you guys saw any impact there, in your business. How much, and if you guys were seeing that for, other products beyond just Storz & Bickel, that were dealing with a similar issue, and if that had any impact on sales for you guys.

Thank you.

Nick Kovacevich
CEO, Greenlane Holdings

Yes.

Yeah, uh-

It did.

Go ahead, Bill Mote.

Bill Mote
CFO, Greenlane Holdings

Go ahead. Overall, like, Storz & Bickel for the quarter was around $3.8 million in revenue. Previous quarter was $4.4 million. We did see a decline, and we saw a similar decline on PAX in Grenco products as well. My perspective is that we're seeing some impacts from the freight and logistics challenges. That's almost spot on consistent with what Storz said in terms of their decline.

Nick Kovacevich
CEO, Greenlane Holdings

Yeah, I'll just add to that. Thanks for the question, Aaron. Look, I think we. It points to, again, why we want to get more vertical with our supply chain, right? We have great partners that we're going to continue to do business with, of course, and expand those relationships, and probably focus a little bit more on our premier partners and probably take on a little bit less as we focus more on our own products. Owning our own supply chain, right? We've spent now two years almost navigating these supply chain disruptions. Speaking for myself, going back with KushCo, and also the Greenlane team, bringing in these goods, since COVID hit.

we have experience. We have a team in China that helps with sourcing. We've got great factory partners. Again, being able to own the brand ourselves and being able to control that supply chain, I think just puts us in a better position to make sure that we're continuing to receive goods and be able to offer and sell goods to our customers during this very trying time when it comes to import logistics and freight and all the other challenges.

Aaron Gray
Managing Director and Head of Consumer and Cannabis Research, Alliance Global Partners

All right. Great. Thanks for that color. That's helpful. Then second one for me, just on CCELL. So Smoore, filed with the ITC a patent infringement. ITC now looking and investigating into it. So just want to get some color in terms of maybe potential indirect impacts, you guys are seeing, as in it looks like there was a notable amount of your competitors on the CCELL side that were named, within the infringement filing. So are you guys seeing anything indirect, whether or not in terms of, MSOs, maybe coming to you who had gone towards other competitors that had lower price offerings, which you've spoken to in the past, or maybe any outcomes you might look to see over the next, year or so as the ITC investigates? Thanks.

Nick Kovacevich
CEO, Greenlane Holdings

Yeah. Look, we're already seeing some positive momentum. I think, operators are becoming increasingly aware and concerned about their supply chains, right? Given what we were just talking about with all of the global headwinds. This is one more thing to add to the plate. If you're a multi-state operator or single state operator and you're growing and this is an important category for you, which it is virtually across the board for everybody, you've got Chinese New Year, CNY coming up. You've got all these global freight challenges, and now you have the IP enforcement actions that include this ITC claim as one of several actions that Smoore and us as a partner are taking.

you just don't want to necessarily enter into that kind of risk with such an important part of your supply chain. We're seeing conversations happening from folks that were previously more concerned about price are becoming now less concerned about price and more concerned about reliability, which is exactly what we've been able to offer with what we're doing with CCELL over the last several years, a trusted solution, best in class quality. Those conversations are underway. I think, people will still continue to take advantage of maybe some of the lower priced options until those options are completely shut off, which we believe will happen if the ITC review is successful in our favor.

I think will be slow progress, but definitely some progress and some upside for us here in the near term, and then certainly significant, very meaningful upside in the long term as we get the infringing products off the market, hopefully. We're able to provide the best in class CCELL solutions across the board.

Aaron Gray
Managing Director and Head of Consumer and Cannabis Research, Alliance Global Partners

All right, great. Yeah, if you look at a proxy with the Reynolds, Philip Morris, a similar filing looks promising for you guys. Thanks for the call then. I'll go ahead and jump back in the queue.

Thank you.

Thank you , Aaron.

Scott Fortune
Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst, ROTH MKM

Hey, good morning. This is Nick on for Scott. First question for me, I'm just looking for some color on the product uptake side. You took that impairment as you worked to realize efficiencies on the inventory side. Can you call out any SKUs of emphasis that have seen good consumer and B2B uptake here and kind of how that's influenced future product rollouts? Thanks.

Nick Kovacevich
CEO, Greenlane Holdings

Yeah, I mean, I think, look, at a high level, this is a company getting more focused. We'd love to be everything to everyone, but given the current capital environment, we realize that we need to be a little bit more focused on what we do. Moving to company-owned brands is certainly the right strategy. If you think about what we laid out, the ability to organically grow to $70 million next year, potentially with 45% gross margin. I mean, that portion of our business, which we said is will be 22%-28%. That portion of our business alone, arguably, and you're the analyst, right? Arguably could be worth more than our entire market cap today, right?

Given the pressures that the whole sector has faced and the pressures that the Greenlane stock has faced, it just doesn't make sense to continue to invest in a lot of things that are on the periphery, right? Partner brands that we're selling that maybe we don't see long-term viability. Maybe the margin profile isn't where it needs to be. Maybe the demand for the product has slowed down considerably. Those are the goods that we decided to discontinue. They just didn't fit in our strategic plan going forward. Ultimately, that's going to free up cash to be able to invest in the goods that do fit into our strategic plan, namely the company-owned consumer brands.

We'll be able to then ensure that we have product. I think we were just talking about, the supply chain issues. We're going to have to outlay more capital to ensure that we have the product to build our own brands. As we embark down the strategy, we don't want to be in a situation where we're outlaying significant investment in terms of marketing and sales, and then only to fall short because we don't have the supply. Getting more focused, find the right goods, find the highest margin, highest value goods is all part of this change in our business.

We did take the one-time charge, which we think will be ultimately, in the long term, in the best interest of the company and of everybody involved as we strategically make this pivot, toward a much more valuable business.

Scott Fortune
Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst, ROTH MKM

Okay, that's great. I appreciate that color. Then, just turning to the e-commerce side, you operate several different platforms servicing different segments here. I was just wondering how you look at potentially consolidating those that may have some overlap, just kind of how you look at your e-com footprint from an efficiency standpoint moving forward here.

Nick Kovacevich
CEO, Greenlane Holdings

Yeah. Great question. We have a very robust e-com plan through 2022. That will be one of the areas that we will be making additional investment as we pull back on some of the other areas that I just said. As we have a much stronger house of brands portfolio, especially with the DaVinci acquisition coming into the fold here in the near future, we want to make sure we're investing in our direct-to-consumer relationships via e-commerce and sort of, we have right now a few sites that are more robust in terms of the offering like vapor.com.

We want to maybe consolidate those down into one very robust e-commerce site and then separately have direct-to-consumer purchasing available through the individual brand websites. We need to build brand content, and we need to offer the loyal consumers that have identified with those brands the opportunity to buy direct from the company. That's at a very high level our strategy for e-com. It will involve definitely optimizing, streamlining, and reducing the amount of e-commerce properties, but becoming very good and very effective at managing likely one B2C larger website and individual brand websites that can offer that D2C experience that we're seeing trending you know across all consumer segments here today in the country.

Scott Fortune
Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst, ROTH MKM

Great. That's it for me. I appreciate the color.

Nick Kovacevich
CEO, Greenlane Holdings

Thanks for the question.

Derek Margiotta
Equity Research Associate, Jefferies

Hi. Thanks for taking my question, guys. Congrats on the merger. Just for me, related to the DaVinci acquisition, this kind of new focus on the higher margin proprietary brands, I guess sourcing these types of different brands, where are you guys looking to, see that, either through your existing distribution relationships or looking outside? I guess, the continuation of your, distribution relationships with third-party brands. I think that was probably a good pipeline for you guys to find these, proprietary brands that you want to bring under your Greenlane brand umbrella. A little color on that would be helpful.

Nick Kovacevich
CEO, Greenlane Holdings

Yeah. A great question. Thanks for asking. Look, I think, we have factory relationships already. I mean, these brands, that we already own, we've been producing product. We're going to expand and fortify that. We think there's opportunity for cost decrease. We think there's opportunity for quality increase. We think there's opportunity to potentially migrate some of the production out of, high tariff, difficult logistic regions like China, for example, depending on the product set.

We want to make sure we have redundancy, we want to make sure we have, a clear path to being able to scale the production in the manner needed as see our aggressive growth plan of these brands going from estimated $45 million today up to $70, and then up over $100 in 2023. We have to prepare for that from a supply chain standpoint. Luckily, we have a world-class sourcing team, as I mentioned, with team members in China. We've done a good job of that historically at both companies. As we come together here, again, part of the benefit of getting more focused is will be able to really put our energy and resources behind the supply chain, specifically more for these company-owned brands.

Yes, that does come with a reduction of sort of the broad assortment of brands that we've historically carried, and will be much more opportunistic about which brands we decide to do business with. Again, we're probably going to look to do more business with a fewer subset of brand partners than we have historically. Look, I think that could be you know more permanent. That could be something that we end up shifting you know back towards as sort of the capital markets improve for cannabis and for Greenlane. It is a little bit fluid, but we still have a pulse on the market. We still have relationships. We have a lens. We're talking to store owners. We have a field sales team.

We're able to get that visibility and data, and to the extent we want to make more acquisitions, we still will have a pipeline that's currently actually still fairly robust and probably going to expand just naturally. Again, we have to be conscious of sort of the dilution effect, right? We know that, there's opportunities to buy companies. If the market's not valuing Greenlane at where we feel that we should be valued, given our company-owned brand portfolio, will be much harder for us to be aggressive on the M&A front. We've got to stay nimble. Like I said, we have a pipeline.

I think that will continue to grow organically, even as we move away from the proliferation of third-party brands that we've historically offered. As we get more focused within our own categories, if you look at our portfolio of brands, with DaVinci, we now have most of the mainstay categories. We have the glassware and accessories with Higher Standards and Keith Haring. We've got the grinders with Groove and Aerospaced. Now the vaporizers coming on with DaVinci, and of course, VIBES rolling papers and the paper product category that we offer there. We've got the silicone products with HYPE. As you see, we're building out the different categories.

I think really when we look at opportunities that may be, "Hey, what's an adjacent category?" 'Cause if it's something that we're already doing, we can make those investments ourselves as we have been doing. We just had a very successful product launch with HYPE, the Auraflex intellectual property. It's a wonderful product if you haven't seen it. It looks like glass, but it's actually silicone. We expect to be able to do more of that organically. Really we're moving to a scenario where we can control our own destiny, much more so than we have historically at Greenlane or KushCo. That feels really good, especially as we're in this uncertain environment, and we're looking to get profitable, right?

This strategy is going to allow us to significantly enhance our margins.

Derek Margiotta
Equity Research Associate, Jefferies

Awesome. Thanks for the color on that. Appreciate that. Just a final question from me. Just touching on Canada, massive declines. It makes sense, the shifting away from low-margin nicotine sales. Is there anything else that's driving that decline in Canada? I guess, is there a strategy going forward on how to recoup that lost sales from the low-margin nicotine?

Nick Kovacevich
CEO, Greenlane Holdings

To be honest, we've had some internal issues, right? Some of this is stuff that we can just do better as a company, and we intend to. I think naturally we'll be able to win back business in that market. It is a tough market. We're seeing it especially on the industrial goods side. We're seeing some of the larger Canadian LPs report. I mean, we're all seeing the same data, right? On the consumer goods side, it's a little bit different. You mentioned the move away from nicotine. That certainly was a big driver of growth for Greenlane historically in Canada. And JUUL being, an extremely popular product in its heyday, that's shifted as well.

We have to reevaluate our strategy a little bit. We've got to execute better in Canada. Again, as we move to more focus on our company-owned brands, Canada's a white space for us. We don't sell a lot of our own branded products in Canada. There are some strategies that we're looking to be able to help accelerate that. We have our footprint in Europe as well, which we see as the sort of next great cannabis frontier. As we get more focused, there's plenty of opportunity right here in our backyard here in the US.

We have to balance how much energy, effort, and resources we spend in these international markets, when we're sitting right here in the largest cannabis market in the world in the U.S., and we have relationships with the biggest players, and we have opportunity to cross-sell all of our products. will be a little bit of a dance we do. Again, going to continue to be influenced by capital and access to capital. We want to be very mindful of the cost of making those types of investments.

Make sure that if we're going to take on that cost, that we can fund it with the working capital we have or leveraging you know some less dilutive measures you know in terms of accessing debt or other things like that. Unless the opportunity and risk reward is there, right? We may make those investments ourselves.

Derek Margiotta
Equity Research Associate, Jefferies

All right. Thanks so much, Nick. Yeah, I'll jump back in the queue.

Nick Kovacevich
CEO, Greenlane Holdings

Thank you so much.

Okay, great. Well, thank you again for joining Greenlane's conference call today. I would also like to sincerely thank our team for all their dedicated hard work. Going through a merger like we have, sort of refocusing our strategic goal for our business, there's been a lot of change at Greenlane. Our team's done a strong performance embracing the change, getting excited about the future. We're certainly more excited than ever. I was honored to be able to deliver the first conference call as CEO of Greenlane, and I look forward to many more. Thank you guys for tuning in. Look forward to updating you on our progress and giving you the results on our next earnings call. Thanks, and have a great rest of your week.

Derek Margiotta
Equity Research Associate, Jefferies

Thanks, everyone.

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