Why Do the Biggest Thailand Cannabis Forecasts Keep Missing?
They keep missing because they are built with a shared template designed for slow, stable markets, applied to a market that opened fast, crowded faster, and then began to thin out.
A major research house valued Thailand's cannabis market at nine billion dollars. It is a confident number, and it is the kind of number that ends up in pitch decks and board papers. The problem is how it was made.
What Is the Template Problem in Global Market Forecasts?
Global research houses cover hundreds of markets with a shared method. A category size, an assumed growth rate, a regional adjustment, and a spreadsheet that scales the same logic across countries the analyst has never visited. That approach is efficient. In a slow, stable market it is also roughly fine.
Thailand's cannabis market is neither slow nor stable. It opened fast, crowded faster, and then began to thin out, all inside a few years. A template built for stability cannot see a market moving that quickly, and it tends to carry forward a moment that has already passed.
What Does Ground-Level Research Say Instead?
We built our view the other way around. Three years of fieldwork, more than 850 dispensaries visited the length of the country, farms and operators interviewed, and the licensing process completed end to end. When you assemble a market from what is actually on the shelf rather than what a curve predicts, you get a different picture, and the gap between the two is not small.
We are not asking anyone to take that on faith. The point of the report is that every figure is shown with its reasoning, so it can be checked rather than believed.
They are built with a shared template designed for slow, stable markets, applied to a market that opened fast, crowded faster, and then began to thin out inside a few years.
A category size, an assumed growth rate, and a regional adjustment scaled across countries the analyst has never visited, which is efficient but cannot see a market moving quickly.
The other way around: three years of fieldwork, more than 850 dispensaries visited, farms and operators interviewed, and the licensing process completed end to end.
No. Every figure is shown with its reasoning, so it can be checked rather than believed.
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.