Trulieve becomes the first U.S. cannabis company to trade on the NYSE on June 10. To get through the door, it carved the recreational weed out of the company entirely.
Wall Street is letting in a U.S. weed company for the first time. Just not the recreational side of it.
Florida-based Trulieve said on June 5 that it will become the first U.S. plant-touching cannabis operator to list on a major American exchange. Canadian producers have traded on the Nasdaq and NYSE for years, as long as they keep their weed out of the U.S. No American operator that actually sells the plant here had cracked a senior U.S. exchange until now. Trulieve’s shares begin trading on the NYSE on June 10 under the ticker TRLV. The over-the-counter shares most investors have been stuck with, TCNNF, jumped about 20% on the news and are up roughly 42% this year.
Here is the part that the milestone headlines skate past. To qualify, Trulieve did not bring its whole business to the NYSE. It carved its recreational operations out into a separate entity called Harvest Enterprises and brought in an outside investor, Whitley Holding, with about $14.8 million for a 10% voting stake, enough to make the split real under accounting rules. What lists on the NYSE is the medical-only company. The adult-use weed that half the country can buy in a dispensary stays outside, in a box that converts back to Trulieve only if and when federal rules let recreational operators in.
Trulieve could pull this off because of what it owns. The company runs 206 medical dispensaries and controls as much as 40% of Florida’s medical market by some estimates, so the medical business stands on its own as an investment even with the recreational revenue stripped out.
The split is not …
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Author: Javier Hasse / High Times
