British tobacco company Imperial Brands is getting into the cannabis business with a $123 million investment in Auxly Cannabis, the Canadian company run by former Tweed founder Chuck Rifici.
Imperial will also get one out of five board seats at the Vancouver-based licensed producer, which will give it some oversight of corporate governance at the company. Auxly, for its part, will obtain the rights to Imperial’s vaping technology and vapor innovation business Nerudia, which the company says already has a team dedicated to cannabis research.
While Auxly’s core business is cannabis cultivation — it owns Robinsons, a craft cannabis brand based out of Nova Scotia, and Dosecann, a producer of CBD oil out in Prince Edward Island — the company intends to focus primarily on developing vape pens and other product forms besides dried flower that will be part of Canada’s second wave of legalization come October 2019.
Imperial is the second major tobacco company to make an investment in the Canadian cannabis space — in March, Altria finalized a $1.8 billion investment in licensed producer Cronos Group, which gave it a 45 per cent stake in the company, with the ability to increase that stake to 55 per cent through exercising warrants.
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