Ora Pharm Completes Helius Acquisition, Becomes New Zealand’s Largest Medical Cannabis Company

AUCKLAND – Ora Pharm has completed the acquisition of the key assets of Helius Therapeutics and restarted manufacturing operations. The agreement covers Helius’s EU-GMP-certified production plant, its remaining inventory, and its operating licenses, though it excludes the cultivation site Helius once ran.

The purchase follows a binding conditional agreement Ora Pharm signed in May, when executives said the deal would shorten the company’s manufacturing and export timeline by up to two years.

Helius Therapeutics entered voluntary administration in March, closing its manufacturing and cultivation facility after citing sustained commercial pressures within a difficult regulatory and commercial environment. It had been the last of New Zealand’s vertically integrated, seed-to-sale Cannabis operators built around the 2020 Cannabis referendum, after early backer Guy Haddleton put $15 million into its startup phase.

Ora Pharm bought the Helius business for an undisclosed sum, and chief executive Zoe Reece said the company had already been planning to build a manufacturing facility closer to its grower network, and that taking over the Helius plant let it begin operating right away. Reece called New Zealand’s regulatory framework for medical Cannabis robust, and said the strict standards reflect the fact that the product is medicine for patients. She also noted that companies in the sector had been operating in isolation, and said Ora Pharm intends to build shared infrastructure other firms could use.

Ora Pharm is now targeting a resumption of exports within six months, and the deal leaves Ora Pharm New Zealand’s largest medical Cannabis producer, in a sector where Greenfern Industries and a downsized Cannasouth have already retreated.

The Ora Pharm-Helius transaction reads like a market correction. New Zealand built a cluster of pharmaceutical-grade Cannabis manufacturers ahead of demand that never fully materialized, and the capital intensity of GMP-certified production has forced consolidation among the survivors. Ora Pharm’s bet is that owning manufacturing capacity outright, rather than competing for access to it, gives the company room to grow exports while the rest of the sector continues to thin out. The outcome rests on how quickly New Zealand’s export channels mature and how many remaining growers consolidate behind a single processor.