It’s not every day that a legal cannabis company in Canada buys an esteemed vaporizer manufacturer, but that’s just what happened late last year when Canopy Growth Corporation finalized an all-cash acquisition of Storz & Bickel GmBH & Co. KG, which is the Germany-based company that manufactures the Volcano vaporizer.
Canopy Growth paid up to $167.37 million USD for the vaporizer manufacturer, which has released a fleet of herbal vaporizers over the years, including the well-known Volcano as well as other lesser-known vaporizers like the Mighty, Crafty, and Plenty.
Storz & Bickel is based in Tuttlingen, Germany. The company has been manufacturing vaporizers for roughly two decades. Their first vaporizer, the Volcano Classic, set the bar in herbal vaporization technology when it was first released roughly twenty years ago. Since then, the company has risen to become one of the biggest and most well-known vaporizer companies on the planet.
While the acquisition might seem odd to some, what binds the two companies is cannabis. On one end, you have Canopy Growth, which is a diversified cannabis and hemp company that offers consumers a range of curated cannabis varieties that are available in various forms, including dried, oil, and even capsules. Then there’s Storz & Bickel, a company whose products are used in the consumption of cannabis, both dried and concentrated.
With the acquisition of Storz & Bickel, Canopy Growth now owns a company whose vaping products facilitate the consumption or use of Canopy’s own products. Together, the two companies aim to capitalize on Canada’s next wave of federally regulated cannabis products. To quote Canopy Growth Chairman and Co-CEO Bruce Linton, “combining Canopy’s existing designs and Canada’s open environment for federally permissible R&D with Storz & Bickel’s deep IP portfolio and management team” places Canopy Growth in a position “to lead the high-margin vaporizing category around the world.”
Storz & Bickel is an ISO 13485 medical device manufacturer. This status provides the company with a multiple year lead in the medically approved vaporizer market. The company has, at this time, 17 filed patents.