The Althea Group Holdings Ltd (ASX: AGH) share price has stormed higher in morning trade.
At the time of writing the cannabis company's shares are up 4% to 39 cents.
Why is the Althea share price pushing higher?
Investors have been buying the company's shares this morning in response to an update on its prescription growth in January.
According to the release, Althea added 572 new patients in January. This means that a total of 4,590 Australian patients had been prescribed Althea's medicinal cannabis products by 459 Healthcare Professionals at the end of the month.
Whilst this was the second-best month on record for Althea, it was a slight slowdown on December's additions. An average of 28 patients were prescribed the company's medicines each business day in January, compared to 36 patients per day in December. Though, this is likely to be down to the summer holidays falling throughout the majority of January.
Cannabis market continues to grow.
The release advises that the Australian medicinal cannabis market increased at its fourth highest rate in January. A total of 3,151 TGA SAS Category B approvals were made over the period.
If all of Althea's new patients last month were new to the market and have not previously been prescribed a competing medication, it would mean the company captured an 18% share of new patients.
This would indicate that the company is winning market share. With the total market now close to ~31,000 patients, I estimate that Althea has grown its market share to ~14.8%.
Althea CEO Josh Fegan was pleased with the company's performance in January.
He said: "We are unrelenting in our efforts to grow the number of patients utilising Althea products and there is no question that our patient growth in January was better than expected, given that many doctors take time off to spend the summer holidays with their families."
"Althea is incredibly fortunate to have Althea Concierge, our proprietary online prescribing platform, which is able to service doctors and patients 24/7 with all their medicinal cannabis needs, as well as our high performance on the ground sales team. The acceleration in patient numbers experienced over December and January is also continuing into February," he concluded.
