High Tide Inc. (TSXV:HITI) is looking for M&A. Harkirat Grover, President and Chief Executive Officer said during the First Quarter 2024 Audited Financial and Operational Results Conference Call, "Look, Nick, historically, we've been the largest acquirers in Canada. We've built our portfolio very carefully, very selectively. Organically, we've added maybe about 60% of our locations and roughly about 40% through M&A. That is kind of the future trajectory as well on how we see this.

When an M&A opportunity comes, it comes very quickly. But the 2 main reasons we've been very slow on M&A. One, we were very, very focused. We are very focused on free cash flow generation.

And we didn't want to get distracted by again, adding locations. We wanted to tighten up our stores, tighten up our cost, as you can see through our G&A print. We came at 4.4%, lowest in dollar terms in many, many quarters, I couldn't be more happier.

So we wanted to tighten up the operations here. The issues that we see on rapid M&A is a couple of things. One, we need quality companies to acquire.

When our national revenue run rate is $2.7 million, and our peer run rate is only $1.2 million. You can see that it's not an easy trajectory for us to get out there and then acquire a whole bunch of stores and get them to our level. Otherwise, our average per store starts dropping.

The other problem is redundancy because we're so big and we're in so many towns and so many cities, and we have multiple stores, we love to do big block M&A. But in that big block M&A, I don't -- we can't waste shareholder money. We can't just spend shareholder dollars just for the sake of doing M&A. So we don't want redundancy and most operators don't want to just sell their winning stores. They want to sell their entire portfolio, which has a lot of losing stores.

And when we are trading at 4.2x, 4.5x annualized last quarter EBIT to EBITDA multiple, it just doesn't make sense to give whatever someone is asking for. So we don't like overpaying. There are some groups in the country that have been driving these prices up.

But the reason High Tide is successful is we've been very, very disciplined on these things from day one. We don't chase anything. We look for high-quality locations.

We're not going to pay for redundancy and we're not going to overpay for things. And we've got a ton of runway ahead even through organic growth. So M&A will pick up.

M&A is in our DNA. It's not going anywhere. It's also going to happen for the German market for the American market eventually when we get into the U.S.A. We're not going to wait on opening one store at a time.

But Canada, we've got a playbook sorted out. We're growing organically in healthy locations. We have good M&A opportunities that we're capitalizing on, and we're not overpaying for this opportunity.

I do want to mention there are some competitors out there that are driving these prices up just for the sake of it or maybe to keep up with us, but that is not our theme".