Extrapolation vs Enumeration: How Do You Read a Market Report?
Every market estimate is built one of two ways. It is either extrapolated or enumerated, and knowing which you are holding tells you almost everything about how far to trust it.
Extrapolation
Extrapolation takes what happened last period and projects it forward with a growth assumption. It is fast, it is cheap, and it scales beautifully across markets. Its weakness is simple: it assumes the recent past is a reliable guide to the near future. When a market is turning, that assumption quietly breaks, and the estimate inherits the error.
Enumeration
Enumeration counts. It is slow, it does not scale, and it means being physically present in the market. We walked more than 850 dispensaries, sat with farm operators and shop owners, and bought as customers across the country. You cannot template that, which is exactly why it captures what the templates miss.
When you next read a Thailand cannabis figure, ask one question of it: did someone build this from the ground, or from a curve? If the method is not stated, you are almost always holding an extrapolation. In a market like this one, that matters.
Extrapolation projects last period's trend forward with a growth assumption. Enumeration counts, which is slow and does not scale but means being physically present in the market.
It assumes the recent past is a reliable guide to the near future, and when a market is turning, that assumption quietly breaks and the estimate inherits the error.
By enumeration: walking more than 850 dispensaries, sitting with farm operators and shop owners, and buying as customers across the country.
Ask whether it was built from the ground or from a curve. If the method is not stated, it is almost always an extrapolation.
This post gives you the argument. The full method, the figures, and the confidence ratings behind them are in the report. Read a free sample chapter, then decide.
Read the free sample →Three findings from the 2026 edition, free.
Of 8,636 expired dispensary licences, 1,339 renewed. The rest did not bother. That is not a market collapsing. That is a market taking out its own trash.
CertainFewer shops, higher revenue each. The closures removed storefronts, not revenue, because the shops that closed were earning almost nothing. Every desk model read the count and stopped.
LikelyA small minority of shops earn a disproportionate share of all revenue. The bottom half earns a fraction of it. Nobody else has measured this.
LikelyBuilt from 850+ dispensary visits across Thailand, 100+ dispensary owner and operator interviews, 30+ farm owner and operator interviews, and 400+ customer interviews across 40 nationalities. 101 pages. 23 chapters. Every chapter sourced, every figure confidence-tagged.