It has been a tough couple of weeks for Aurora Cannabis (ACB). The company fired their CEO and their stock has fallen almost 30%.
Yesterday, the cannabis producer reported their second-quarter 2020 results before the market opened. They posted a $981 million loss and a batch of earnings that were mostly expected.
Total net revenue came in at 56 million, which was a 26% drop. The company’s cash cost to produce a gram of cannabis sold was $0.88, a slight increase from the previous quarter of $0.85. Consumer cannabis net revenue which excluded provisions grew at 11% from the prior quarter.
When their conference call started at 8 AM EST, the stock was still trading in the red, but slowly started to rally and ended up closing in the green.
Their interim CEO Micheal Singer had some words regarding Aurora Cannabis’s recent quarterly earnings, “Despite delivering modest growth in our core medical and consumer business in Q2, we took immediate and deliberate actions to align our Company to current market conditions. As announced last week, being a profitable cannabis company for our investors is the singular near-term focus for Aurora and we have begun to implement a business transformation plan where we intend to manage the business with a high degree of fiscal discipline.”
Regarding their financial situation, their CFO Glen Ibbott said, “The transformational actions we announced last week have already positively impacted SG&A expense and we are confident that our run-rate will be approximately $40 million – $45 million as we exit the fiscal fourth quarter of 2020. This is a very important step toward EBITDA profitability. In addition, our credit facility was amended to provide greater flexibility to Aurora. More specifically, Aurora chose to downsize the facility by $96.5 million with the elimination of undrawn term loan capacity, and further used $45 million of restricted cash to repay a portion of the drawn term loan balance for the purpose of reducing leverage and cash required for debt service.”
These are encouraging words from both the companies CEO and CFO and have seemed to calm shareholders’ nerves for the time being. What we feel that Aurora Cannabis needs to do at this point is under promise and over deliver to shareholders in the form of results along with confidence resulting in share price appreciation. Aurora Cannabis has a long way to go, but right now when sentiment seems as if it couldn’t get much worse, it could be the time when the company starts to make a turnaround. We will eagerly await a new full-time CEO that will hopefully begin to pave the way to profitability.
(Disclosure: The author is long Aurora Cannabis )
ACB shares were trading at $1.52 per share on Friday afternoon, up $0.05 (+3.40%). Year-to-date, ACB has declined -29.63%, versus a 4.69% rise in the benchmark S&P 500 index during the same period.
About the Author: Aaron Missere
Aaron is an experienced investor who is also the CEO of Departures Capital. His primary focus is on the cannabis industry. He also hosts a weekly show on YouTube about marijuana stocks. Learn more about Aaron’s background, along with links to his most recent articles. More...
