The Scramble for Europe
Last month, the German cannabis market saw its most significant consolidation deal to date, as Canadian heavyweight Organigram announced plans to acquire Sanity Group in a deal worth up to €250m.
Given its size, especially compared to the relatively modest acquisition of Remexian late last year, it’s no surprise Sanity’s deal has captured the market’s attention, driving fervent speculation that this could be the first domino to fall in the long-anticipated consolidation wave across the continent.
However, Organigram is not the only North American company with deep pockets planting a flag in the rapidly developing European medical industry. Several global leaders with years of experience in these markets are already bolstering their positions abroad, driven by a broader shift in market dynamics.
North America’s cannabis market is still the largest on the planet by a wide margin, but the growth story has changed. What was once a high-margin, expansion-driven sector has evolved into a price-sensitive, oversupplied environment where operators are fighting for incremental gains.
Shifting global dynamics
In Canada, retail sales reached $477.9 million in November 2025, up nearly 5% year on year. Yet this growth masks sustained structural pressure. Since legalisation in 2018, the consumer price index for recreational cannabis has fallen from a baseline of 100 to 71.2 by December 2024, representing a cumulative decline of nearly 29%. Prices dropped sharply in the early years of legalisation and, although the pace of decline has slowed, pricing power has not returned.
As of January 2026, 3,843 cannabis stores were open or authorised to open across Canada, intensifying competition in a market where real prices have declined for seven consecutive years.
The US market reflects a similar dynamic. Total adult-use sales remain substantial, but growth in early legal states has slowed materially since the pandemic surge. Wholesale flower prices in mature markets such as California, Colorado and Oregon have fallen dramatically from their 2020 to 2021 peaks, in some cases by more than 50%.
‘First wave’ markets are dealing with significant overproduction, driving price compression, while multi-state operators (MSOs) continue to exit regulated states where high capital and taxation costs have decimated margins.
Crucially, much of the projected US sales growth through 2028 is driven by new states coming online rather than organic expansion in mature markets.
Europe’s growth trajectory stands in sharp contrast to North America’s plateau. According to Prohibition Partners, medical cannabis sales across Europe are forecast to more than double by 2028.
Germany’s medical cannabis imports continued their historic run in Q3 of 2025, seeing the country bring in just under 57 tonnes. The UK market is expanding on the back of unusually high per-patient consumption, while France and Spain are preparing to transition into full commercial medical frameworks.
Right now, European expansion is existential as much as it is opportunistic for the leading North American operators. Aurora Cannabis, Tilray Brands, Curaleaf International, and Organigram have each arrived at the same conclusion, but each is scrambling for market share in its own way.
Aurora
Of all the North American players currently active in Europe, Aurora Cannabis has perhaps made the most deliberate and multi-layered bet.
Its Q3 results, published last month, shows that its global medical cannabis net revenue reached a record CA$76.2m for the quarter, a 12% increase year-on-year, driven primarily by Germany and Poland. Medical cannabis now accounts for 81% of Aurora’s total revenue and 95% of its adjusted gross profit. The company has, in effect, completed its transformation from a diversified cannabis group into a focused international medical business.
“Aurora has established a commanding leadership position within the rapidly expanding, high margin, global medical cannabis market,” said Miguel Martin, Executive Chairman and CEO, alongside the results. Full-year guidance puts annual global medical cannabis revenue at between CA$269 million and CA$281 million, representing 10% to 15% annual growth.
In the same quarterly announcement, Aurora confirmed it would exit certain consumer cannabis markets in Canada from Q4 FY26 onwards, explicitly reallocating product and resources to the higher-margin global medical segment. The consumer business, generating CA$5.2 million in the quarter against medical’s CA$76.2 million, had become a vertical the company could no longer justify.
Speaking to BNN Bloomberg, Martin explained: “Consumer cannabis is a real challenge. The margins and the overall profile of that business really don’t work well for a company like Aurora. Today, we announced further focus on international medical cannabis, which has much stronger margins, much stronger growth, and a real emphasis on science and genetics in regulated markets.”
Rather than relying on distribution partnerships or brand licensing, the company has constructed a layered infrastructure with its German Pedanios business at its core.
Pedanios is a purpose-built European medical brand with established relationships among healthcare professionals. Alongside that sits Aurora’s EU-GMP certified manufacturing presence, a portfolio of locally-relevant digital platforms launched across Germany, the UK, and Poland in February 2026, and, most a significant intellectual property play.
In January 2026, Aurora announced it had been granted Community Plant Variety Rights by the EU’s Community Plant Variety Office for two proprietary cannabis varieties, Farm Gas and Sourdough, bred through its Aurora Coast R&D facility in Canada.
The rights grant Aurora exclusive control over the commercial production and sale of these varieties across all 27 EU member states for the duration of the protection period.
“This protection not only strengthens Aurora’s global genetics portfolio, but also ensures that our high-quality, differentiated varieties can consistently reach patients and consumers worldwide,” said Lana Culley, VP of Innovation and International Operations, in a January press release.
The financial arsenal to deepen its position is also being assembled. Concurrent with its Q3 results, Aurora filed a prospectus supplement establishing a US$100m at-the-market equity programme, with the explicit stated purpose of funding ‘increased cultivation capacity and potential M&A.’
With a debt-free cannabis business and CA$154.4m in cash already on the balance sheet, Aurora enters the next phase of the European scramble better capitalised than most of its peers.
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Tilray
The cannabis giant has taken years to construct what it describes as a ‘unified, scalable medical cannabis platform’ spanning more than 20 countries, encompassing a network of owned assets, distribution partnerships, and local pharmaceutical relationships.
Underpinning this network are two EU-GMP cultivation facilities, in Portugal and Germany, alongside a fully owned sales, marketing, and distribution network in Germany, Australia, and Italy.
In the markets beyond those three, it works through a network of local distributor partnerships. The German operation is anchored by Aphria RX, a wholly owned subsidiary that holds one of only three licences for domestic cannabis cultivation in Germany under the post-CanG liberalised regime.
In January 2026, Tilray rebranded its Italian subsidiary FL Group as Tilray Medical Italia, bringing it in line with the company’s unified global medical brand. The entity operates within Italy’s established medical cannabis framework, supplying products authorised by the Ministry of Health through hospital and pharmacy channels, supported by a strategic partnership with Molteni Farmaceutici, one of Italy’s leading pharmaceutical companies.
“Italy remains a strategically important market for Tilray Medical as we continue to build a leading, regulated medical cannabis platform across Europe,” said Rajnish Ohri, President International at Tilray Brands, in the January 22, 2026 launch announcement.
Weeks later, in February 2026, Tilray’s European pharmaceutical distribution business CC Pharma announced a strategic agreement with Smartway Pharmaceuticals to expand the availability of pharmaceutical products across the UK.
According to Ohri, the partnership leverages Smartway’s established national distribution infrastructure and CC Pharma’s European procurement capability and GMP capacity, and is ‘expected to embed Tilray into the UK health system for its own medicinal cannabis products.’
Tilray’s European ambitions are also reflected in Germany, where it has launched products under its Redecan and Good Supply brands alongside the established Tilray Medical brand.
In 2025, Tilray Deutschland GmbH was awarded a government tender to supply medical cannabis flower in Luxembourg, demonstrating the company’s ability to compete and win in centralised European procurement processes.
The financial picture is more complex. Tilray reported record quarterly revenue of US$217.5m for the three months to November 30, 2025, with international cannabis revenues up 36% year-on-year.
However, it reported a net loss of US$43.5m for the quarter. Operating losses narrowed significantly, down nearly 50% compared to the same period in the prior year, and management predict adjusted EBITDA of between US$62m and US$72m for the full year. But the gap between operational momentum and bottom-line profitability remains a recurring tension for investors, one that European expansion must ultimately help to close.
Most recently, Tilray has moved to substantially expand its European footprint outside of cannabis, announcing this week plans to acquire popular craft beer brand Brewdog.
The company has agreed to acquire the majority of Brewdog’s assets, including its global brand, UK brewing operations, and eleven bars, for £33 million. The deal adds an estimated $200m in annual net revenue to Tilray’s balance sheet and hands it one of the most recognisable craft beer brands in the world, albeit one whose valuation has collapsed from a peak of around £2 billion to an exit that left approximately 200,000 small shareholders with little prospect of recovering their investment.
The company has long argued that cannabis and alcohol occupy adjacent positions in the consumer lifestyle market, and that the distribution infrastructure, retail relationships, and brand-building capabilities developed in one transfer meaningfully to the other. Brewdog’s eleven UK bar locations — including sites in Birmingham, Canary Wharf, Dublin, and the original Ellon taproom in Aberdeenshire, also give Tilray a direct-to-consumer retail footprint in the UK that few cannabis-adjacent businesses can match.
Curaleaf
Having built the largest cannabis operation in the world on the back of the US market, Curaleaf is now redirecting its considerable resources toward international growth with mounting urgency.
Full-year 2025 revenues reached $1.27b, making it by some distance the largest cannabis company on the planet by turnover.
Yet, in the US, it reported a third consecutive year of double-digit price compression, retail revenues down year-on-year, and a domestic operation that, for all its operational discipline, is fighting for incremental gains in a saturated environment. The company’s own management has described 2025 as ‘the trough.’
In a similar position as its stablemates, growth is now coming from international expansion. Curaleaf International posted revenues of $172.5m for the full year, a 63% increase on 2024, with Q4 alone delivering $51m, up 65% year-on-year. The international business is now running at an annualised revenue rate of over $200m, with Germany and the UK identified as the primary drivers.
In Germany, Curaleaf is already the largest supplier in the market. Its UK operations, anchored by Curaleaf Clinic, also boasted the number one market share position by patient count during the quarter. Poland, which had experienced significant disruption following telemedicine restrictions, is also reportedly beginning to recover.
Beyond its sizeable flower export operation, we recently covered Curaleaf’s CE-certified QMID inhalation device, the first of its kind in the UK, which is now emerging as a meaningful competitive differentiator as France and Spain’s incoming frameworks increasingly favour standardised, device-led delivery over traditional flower.
“Medical cannabis is no longer just about availability. It is about delivering consistent, pharmaceutical-grade medicines that can sit credibly alongside other prescribed treatments within established healthcare systems,” Juan Martinez, head of Curaleaf International, explained.
The company also commissioned independent research from the Centre for Economics and Business Research suggesting that expanding NHS access could unlock up to £13.3 billion in economic value over the next decade, a figure that says as much about Curaleaf’s policy positioning as it does about the underlying economics.
The financial firepower to support that expansion has also been substantially reinforced. In February 2026, Curaleaf closed a $500m private placement of senior secured notes due 2029, retiring its existing 2026 debt and extending its runway by three years.
Boris Jordan, Chairman and CEO, described it as the largest bond offering ever completed in the cannabis sector, framing institutional appetite for the deal as a signal of a broader shift in how the sector is perceived by capital markets. The refinancing leaves Curaleaf with $102m in cash and the stated flexibility to pursue strategic acquisitions.
Despite its dominant position in multiple markets, Curaleaf’s international arm is currently dragging on group EBITDA margins by 120 basis points, and the company reported a full-year net loss of $228 million. Management have guided for international margins to remain broadly flat in 2026, with improvement contingent on scale. France and Turkey, both identified as potentially significant future contributors, are not expected to come online until late 2026 and early 2027 respectively.
