Tilray Inc.’s Canadian operations should be profitable sooner than the late 2020 target set for the company as a whole, according to Chief Executive Officer Brendan Kennedy.

The cannabis company said Tuesday that it expects to generate overall positive earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization by the final quarter of next year. However, Kennedy said its primary Canadian business should reach the key metric sooner than that.

“It’s likely that our business in Canada will be Ebitda positive before the rest of our business, just because it’s at a different stage of development,” he said Wednesday in an interview with Bloomberg TV on the sidelines of Cowen & Co.’s cannabis conference in Boston. “That business is much more mature. We’ve been operating it for six years.”

Once-bullish investors have increasingly punished cannabis companies that don’t show a clear path to profitability. Tilray’s shares have fallen about 70 per cent since the beginning of the year amid broad-based weakness across the sector. The stock was also volatile on Wednesday after the company posted a wider-than-expected Ebitda loss.

Management’s optimistic forecasts have been thwarted due to a slower-than-expected retail rollout in Canada and regulatory issues in the U.S., but Kennedy said he’s confident that Tilray will meet its guidance, which assumes 800 to 1,000 stores open by the end of 2020.

“We have some buffer in our targets,” he said. “That gives us a lot of confidence.”

Tilray also said it has enough cash to fund its operations until it reaches positive Ebitda in late 2020, but Kennedy said it has options if it does need to raise capital.

“We have about US$300 million in real estate and facility assets that we own completely, so that’s clearly one option,” he said. “But at this point we haven’t moved very far down any of those paths.”