Why the $9 billion Thailand cannabis forecast is wrong

The most-cited forecasts for Thailand's cannabis market are built on a growth curve the market already fell off. That single error is why the headline numbers you have read are wrong, and why sizing an entry off them will cost you.

The figures in circulation put Thailand at $7.1 billion, $9.18 billion, and $9.6 billion by 2030. They are total-market projections, and each is built the same way: take the explosive growth of the early legalization window and extend it in a straight line to the end of the decade. It is a clean method and it produces a big number. It is also detached from what happened next.

What happened next is a crash. The legal market peaked in 2024 at roughly $1.44 billion and then drew down 36.5% Certain as thousands of the weakest shops closed and price competition collapsed margins. The forecasts that reach $9 billion were modeling the boom while the bust was already underway. They are not forecasts of the market that exists. They are forecasts of a market that stopped existing around the middle of 2024.

The market did not vanish. It consolidated.

This is the part the collapse headlines miss in the other direction. The drawdown was real, but the revenue did not disappear - it concentrated into fewer, better, larger operators, and the national topline held far closer to its former self than the shop-count carnage suggests. The market today sits at Likely, well below the trajectory those models assume and well above zero. the exact figure is in the report →

Read the crash as a collapse and you will walk away from a market that is quietly stabilizing. Read the old forecasts as gospel and you will oversize it by multiples. Both mistakes are expensive, and they come from the same failure to measure what is actually on the ground.

The export story the bull case leans on is legally gated

Part of every optimistic model is an export boom into Europe. It is worth understanding why that leg is years away, not imminent. Selling finished cannabis into the EU requires EU-GMP certification for the finished product. A live query of the European Union's own EudraGMDP register on 02 July 2026 returns zero cannabis finished-product EU-GMP certifications of any kind for Thailand Certain.

Some producers advertise EU-GMP alignment. Alignment is not a held certificate. Thai material that reaches Europe today is finished under someone else's certification in a third country, a practice the industry openly calls GMP washing. Until a Thai producer actually holds the credential, the export leg cannot carry the weight the forecasts place on it. The bull case is resting on a door that is still locked.

What the ground actually supports

Our own 2030 forecast is a fraction of the incumbent figure, and it crosses the 2024 peak years later than the straight-line models imply. The scenarios, the central case, and the year the market recovers its old high are all reconstructed and confidence-tagged in the full report Guessing, as all forecasts are . see the forecast in the report →

The difference between our number and theirs is not optimism versus pessimism. It is measurement versus extrapolation. The incumbent reports modeled Thailand from abroad, from a legalization headline and a growth rate. This market was measured on the ground - 850 dispensaries visited, 100 operators and 30 farm owners interviewed, the licensing process completed first-hand - which is precisely why the two numbers diverge by so much. One of them accounts for the crash. The other never saw it.