You either buy them with cash, or you buy them with your currency. And so, others have raised a ton of money. We have not done that. And we have — our total CapEx spend last year was about $9 million. So this is why we’re going to be disciplined again. This year, we’re going to do half of it through organic growth, so we can manage our cash really well. And the other half is going through M&A with our currency that we’ve been using very well. So it’s going to be an even split between the two.
Andrew Partheniou: Thanks for that, and I appreciate the correction. I’ll get back in the queue.
Operator: . Our first question today comes from Andrew Semple from Echelon. Your line is now open.
Andrew Semple: Hi there. Good morning, and congrats to the High Tide team on the very strong fourth quarter results. I’m glad to see the continuing momentum in retail in Canada. First question here, just wanted to go back to, I guess, some of the prepared remarks about the e-commerce sales, and I really appreciate the additional color there. Based on my math, it actually appears that the e-commerce revenues are actually beginning to show a bit more stability, maybe down low single digits quarter over quarter compared to the double-digit declines you saw in Q2 and Q3. Do you believe the segment could return to growth in the year ahead, or is it too early to tell on that?
Raj Grover: Good morning, Andrew, and thank you for your question. So, Andrew, our e-commerce step was definitely stable quarter over quarter. And I want to highlight the fact that our accessories business because we have — like I mentioned, GrassCity and Smoke Cartel are the two most searchable online accessories platforms in the whole world. And because of that searchability and being number one in the whole universe, they didn’t really get too affected. And the rest of the platforms are smaller anyway. Really, where we felt the impact was strictly our CBD businesses, and it was across the board. It was in the United States, and it was for Blessed in the UK. And like I mentioned over the last earnings call, when people are prioritizing essentials, food, and gas, they’re a little shy of buying a $100 bottle of CBD.
That doesn’t mean that our brands are not performing, or our brands are not there to take market share as more of these global markets open up. But I always like to under promise and over deliver and not talk about fluff that is not real. So we are stable, quarter over quarter. We’ve had a good holiday season, like we mentioned in our script and the earnings press release. But after the holiday season, sales always slow down, whether it’s cannabis, whether it’s CBD, whether it’s consumption accessories. It’s the same thing we saw with the ELITE as well. In the holiday season, people had money in their wallets. But as the spending finishes, and then you get into the next season, spending goes down a little bit. So we feel that our e-commerce platforms will remain stable.
They’re not like tanking by any measure, you’re absolutely correct. But like I said, we like to be cautious about things. Our core business — 87% of our business is brick and mortar anyway. The remaining 6%, 7% of our online accessories business is still thriving, given our searchability factor that we have on Google. And our CBD businesses, these are the brands that we’re going to build into the future. I am very excited about them. As these new markets open up, many markets in Asia, including Japan, is now talking about a medical cannabis legalization, which means they’re going to get more and more friendly towards CBD products as well. I’m having conversations in the Middle East as well. So we’re not concerned about the long-term nature of our CBD business.
