As Europe’s medical cannabis markets continue to mature, an increasingly familiar pattern is beginning to emerge.
First, access opens and demand surges. Then operators and products flood into the market, leading to the compression of both the price for patients and the margins for businesses. This, inevitably, is followed by consolidation as those without the deep pockets to weather the price crush give way to those who do.
In Denmark, one of the continent’s longest-running pilot-turned-permanent markets, that cycle appears to be entering the consolidation phase, with one company emerging as a dominant player in both major product categories.
Stenocare, the Danish oil and extract specialist listed on Nasdaq First North, has spent the past 12 months quietly assembling a commanding position in its home market.
The recent acquisition of competitor CannGros has brought flower into its operation for the first time. A string of international partnerships has extended its reach into Germany, Norway, and Australia. And this week, it announced plans to break into France.
“We are the dominant player on extracts, we’re the only one with four approved products,” said CEO Thomas Skovlund Schnegelsberg. “And now we also have five products on flower, where the only other competitor has two.”
The French opportunity
Stenocare announced this week that it has partnered with Institut des Cannabinoïdes Médicaux Français (ICMF) to submit its ASTRUM 10-10 oil product to France’s Haute Autorité de Santé (HAS) for reimbursement evaluation, as the country prepares to transition its four-year pilot programme into a permanent legal framework.
Movianto, the pharmaceutical logistics arm of Yusen Logistics Healthcare and France’s leading pharma distributor, has also been secured as the national distribution partner, giving the venture a ready-made route to pharmacies across the country.
As we’ve reported recently, the highly-anticipated French national medical cannabis framework is now entering its final stages, set to see the launch of a new European market with a potentially huge addressable patient population.
However, much to the dismay of companies that have centred their European operations around Germany’s insatiable appetite for flower, France’s incoming market is all but omitting it as a format, opening the door for companies leading the way in alternative formats.
This dynamic plays directly to Stenocare’s core strength as a specialist in pharmaceutical-grade extracts and its proprietary ASTRUM oil technology, which is designed to improve the bioavailability and dosing consistency of cannabinoids in the bloodstream.
“France represents one of the most significant future markets for medical cannabis in Europe,” said Schnegelsberg. “Submitting the ASTRUM 10-10 dossier is a key milestone.”
According to local sources familiar with the French process, approvals could move faster than previously expected, potentially in as little as three months for companies with their pharmaceutical dossiers ready, though the political timeline remains unpredictable.
But Stenocare’s push into France is based on a foundation of hard-won domestic strength and a consolidation strategy that encapsulates this emerging maturity cycle.
Domestic market domination
When Stenocare was founded in 2018, it made a deliberate decision to focus exclusively on oil and extract products, betting that physicians would eventually gravitate towards a format more comparable with traditional medicine.
“You hear from doctors that they didn’t go five years to university to prescribe joints,” Schnegelsberg told Business of Cannabis. “It was a bit of an arrogant way of looking at it.”
That bet hasn’t yet fully paid off. By his own estimates, flower products still account for roughly 60% of the European medical cannabis market, and by 2024, Stenocare’s leadership was asking itself why it was competing in only 40% of the addressable market.
Having initially pursued vertical integration and building out its own cultivation facility, Stenocare pivoted to a more asset-light business model, divesting its cultivation operations in late 2024.
With this strategy front of mind, Stenocare looked towards established Danish flower players rather than re-establishing its own operations to solve this issue.
Throughout 2025, Stenocare watched Denmark’s two flower suppliers become locked in a price spiral, slashing retail prices by as much as 50% in six months. The margins, Schnegelsberg said, were clearly unsustainable.
“We started looking at their quarterly reports, listening to their press releases, and we sort of saw a trend that they were hurting, and hurting more as the year progressed,” he said. “We could see their burn rate on cash was way beyond what they had in the bank.”
By late summer, Stenocare approached DanCann Pharma, owner of the flower brand CannGros and the market leader in the category. The deal closed in November 2025, a share-for-share exchange that gave Stenocare 100% of CannGros’s subsidiary, including five approved flower products, in return for 5 million newly issued shares.
Crucially, Stenocare acquired the company without employees, without debt, and without operational commitments. What it got was five products approved by the Danish Medicines Agency, the equivalent, Schnegelsberg said, of five years of regulatory investment.
As such, Stenocare was able to integrate CannGros’s products into its existing infrastructure without adding any costs. Its more automated operations meant it could absorb the work that DanCann had been doing manually, without needing additional staff or facility expansion.
“We could basically integrate it into our current setup,” said Schnegelsberg. “So without even raising the prices, we could still turn this into an attractive business.”
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Denmark’s pricing system for prescription medicines is unusual in Europe and helps explain how the flower market deteriorated so quickly. Every two weeks, suppliers submit their desired price and available volume into a blind auction system.
The following day, prices are published, frozen for the fortnight, and automatically cascaded to every pharmacy in the country. Crucially, pharmacists are legally obliged to dispense the lowest-priced product where a substitute is available, meaning that in categories with competing products, there is a structural incentive to undercut.
It was this mechanism that fuelled the flower price spiral through 2025, as operators raced to the bottom to secure the cheapest-product designation. For Stenocare, which had no flower products at the time, it was a race it could afford to watch from the sidelines.
But once it acquired CannGros, Stenocare moved in the opposite direction, raising prices by around 45% from day one, pulling them back towards pre-spiral levels. Its sole remaining flower competitor followed suit.
“They were welcoming the fact that we came in and raised the prices,” Schnegelsberg said. “So now we are head-to-head on a higher level. That actually adds to the business case in a very positive way.”
The result is a company that now commands both categories of Denmark’s medical cannabis market. In oils and extracts, Stenocare’s four approved products face effectively no competition; its two rivals each hold a single product in the lowest-volume segment. In flower, it now holds five products against a single competitor with two, and holds exclusivity on three of those for the entire Danish market.
Further international expansion routes
With France and Spain poised to launch flower-less markets in the coming months, Stenocare remains focused on strengthening the commercial footprint of its ASTRUM oil technology.
In January, the company announced a new partnership with WEECO Pharma GmbH to launch a co-branded ASTRUM 10-10 extract in Germany, Europe’s largest medical cannabis market. The deal sits alongside an existing relationship with Adress Pharma, but WEECO brings a more robust sales engine, with medical consultants visiting doctors and pharmacists directly and investing in educational materials around the product.
Schnegelsberg said the partnership is designed to test how far the ASTRUM brand can go in Germany before expanding the product line further. “They like to see how they’re performing according to their very ambitious plans, and then we’ll see other product innovation based on that oil technology going forward,” he said.
Its CannGros acquisition is expected to add DKK 4-6m in annual revenue, supporting a revised break-even target of 2026, pushed back from an original target of 2025 as the company navigated regulatory headwinds and a difficult domestic market.
For now, Schnegelsberg said, 2026 is about consolidation; integrating CannGros, delivering on the business case, and letting the international partnerships build momentum. Flower exports, he added, are a conversation for 2027.
“We don’t want to rock the boat any further,” he said.