Flying high on deal

Airport joins pot- stock boom in building cannabis facility

THE chairman of the nation’s biggest medical marijuana company says a major new growing and manufacturing facility to be built at Melbourne Airport will give the company the scale it needs to compete internationally.

Cann Group has signed an agreement with Melbourne Airport operator Australia Pacific Airports Corporation to build the nation’s largest medical marijuana growing and manufacturing facility within the Tullamarine precinct.

The 37,000sq m facility, which is twice the size Cann was originally planning, will process one million plants a year when it is up and running.

Shares in Cann surged 7.5 per cent on the announcement. The company’s share price has surged almost 900 per cent since it took to the bourse in May last year as it has ridden the nation’s pot- stock boom.

Chairman Allan McCallum said the new facility would give Cann the economies of scale it needed to provide medical marijuana products to the domestic and international markets.

“There is enormous demand … in the world at present – we’ve got to get our costs of production down and this will make us relatively world competitive,” Mr McCallum said yesterday.

“Our future is getting into products and we will be able to do any form of current medication – whether it’s pills, whether it’s an oil or whatever else – at this site.”

Australia Pacific Airports will build the $ 100 million facility and lease it back to Cann.

Work is expected to begin by September and the first plants are expected to be moved into the building by the end of next year. The facility will have the equivalent of 170 full- time workers when fully running, taking Cann’s workforce to more than 210.

Cann was considering various sites but went with the airport precinct as it provided a reliable supply of electricity, gas and water as well as a large recruitment area.

“We will be looking at additional sites but they will be grow facilities without manufacturing and there is a couple of regional sites we are going through the process on now,” Mr McCallum said.

Australia Pacific Airports property chief Linc Horton said Cann’s decision to locate its new facility within the airport precinct would help “connect Victoria’s technology industry to the rest of the world”.