Hi, I'm Dan Pramak, and welcome to Axios Recap, presented by Facebook.

Today's Wednesday, December 16th.

The Fed's Q1 GDP forecast is up, Wish stock is down after its big IPO, and we're focused

on cannabis consolidation. Earlier today, a pair of big Canadian cannabis companies,

Afria and Tilray, announced plans to merge. The combined company would be worth nearly

$4 billion dollars and would become the world's largest cannabis company in terms of annual sales.

Oh, and in case you happen to own stock in one of them, Afria shareholders

will own 62% of the combined business, but it'll go by the name Tilray. Anyway, why it matters

is that this deal reflects both the promise and pitfalls of one of North America's newest

legal commodities. On the one hand, legal pot has never been hotter. Several more states legalized

it during the November elections, and the House of Representatives even voted for federal

legalization just a couple weeks ago, even though the Senate's not planning to take it up. Plus,

both Afria and Tilray have partnered with big-name beverage makers to help incorporate cannabis

into new liquid products.

But on the other hand, neither company has quite gotten the expected sales surge from Canada's

move last year to fully legalize. Both company revenues are up a lot year over year, but not

quite where some analysts pegged them to be, with some pointing to pockets of oversupply.

So we want to dig into what today's deal and last month's U.S. elections mean for the future of

cannabis with the CEOs of both Afria and Tilray.

That conversation in 15 seconds.

We're joined now by Erwin Simon, CEO of Afria and Brendan Kennedy, CEO of Tillray.

So Erwin, give me a little background here, or kind of the shortest version of why do this merger?

...