Although a resources business since its founding, Western Australian gold explorer, International Goldfields Limited (IGS) has bought an 85% stake in Uruguay-based non-synthetic cannabis business, Winter Garden, in order to diversify into a promising sector within agribusiness in the face of a downturn for the resources industry.
Earlier this year, IGS attempted to acquired Musketeer Mining with assets in Western Australia’s Pilbara region, but the market would not support it, but International Goldfields Limited director, David Tasker, tells ABC that the acquisition of Winter Garden has generated a much different response, with IGS shares climbing 50% after Friday’s announcement.
He adds that Uruguay’s heavily regulated marijuana growing industry makes the move a perfect agribusiness diversification, and the deeper layers of diversification that can be achieved through manufacturing tablets, patches, and synthetics for the pharmaceutical and recreational marijuana industries were “just too good to pass up”.
“I think when people are educated on those factors and see us as more than just an agribusiness product, where hemp is grown in a greenhouse in a legal sense, [as] it is in some parts of the world and see it as a pharmaceutical product, which has massive applications globally, we’re sitting in an amazingly well regulated and controlled environment in Uruguay, they start to get it pretty quickly,” says Mr. Tasker.
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