Sativa Wellness Group plc (AQSE:SWEL) Executive Chairman Geremy Thomas caught up with DirectorsTalk to discuss the roll out of more testing facilities, how long this will last for and developing new wellness activities going forward.
Q1: You’ve announced today that your Bath and Bristol stores are booking up to £27,000 a day in COVID testing. Geremy, this appears to be a pivot away from your cannabis routes?
A1: Sativa Wellness Group’s CBD therapeutics business continues at pace and I’ll hopefully be back with you shortly to announce some sales wins that we’ve been working on.
The wellness business that we have covers production of hand sanitiser and certainly does a lot of COVID testing for travellers that require PCR tests. We talk about our results for December and things are quieter now as we’re suffering from these very very severe travel restrictions but we’re putting in place, in response to what we believe is an uptick in travel, a greater reach for the company.
So, today, we announced a further eight facilities for testing, bringing our total to ten and we announced today that we intend to take that up to thirty.
Q2: The opportunity appears to be very lucrative, how long do you think this can last for?
A2: I think we’re all excited about the vaccine roll-out and I’m sure that that will have an effect on international travel but I think this year we’ll certainly be relying on a combination of vaccine take up and the continued use of PCR testing to confirm that travellers don’t in fact have COVID.
Q3: How will Sativa Wellness Group develop these new wellness activities?
A3: Well, I think on the testing front, the swabbing will likely be joined in terms of our product offering by blood testing. I think we’re all going to be curious about whether these vaccinations have worked for us and we can do a simple blood test that will express the take up of antibodies or antibody level that people have. I think that’ll be a big market for us to move from swabbing into blood testing.
In the fullness of time, we hope to be in a position to offer vaccinations and boosters but that will be after the government has completed its roll-out.
