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  • 2019-01-11 (xsd:date)
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  • Did the Company That Makes Marlboros Announce They Intend to Stop Producing Cigarettes? (en)
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  • Some readers were left skeptical in January 2019 after a spate of news articles reported that Philip Morris International (PMI), the company that makes and markets the iconic Marlboro brand outside of the United States, had announced plans to end their production of cigarettes altogether. On 9 January, for example, Newsweek reported that: WDCG radio similarly reported that: Similar articles followed from WITI, WTMX, and Rare.us. These reports were largely accurate but misrepresented Philip Morris International's (PMI) strategy of shifting production away from conventional cigarettes as a new announcement in the early days of 2019. In reality, PMI has for months and even years been engaged in what it described in 2018 as a relentless business shift toward [a] smoke-free future, providing initial funding for a major research initiative called the Foundation for a Smoke-Free world, as well as developing and marketing a heated tobacco device called IQOS and a nicotine-containing e-vapor product called MESH, among others. Since February 2017, the company's website has featured a pagethat stating that: In May 2018, the company promoted their 2017 Sustainability Report with a clear expression of its intention to cease production of conventional cigarettes, writing that PMI’s commitment and ambition is to replace cigarettes as soon as possible with better alternatives to smoking for the millions of men and women who would otherwise continue to smoke. So what happened in January 2019 was not that PMI announced, for the first time, that they intended to phase out their production of cigarettes entirely, but that the UK's Sky News conducted an interview with Calantzopoulos, who reiterated the company's intentions, saying that The ambition we have is to replace cigarettes as soon as possible with better alternatives, obviously, for the people who continue smoking ...: Many of the January 2019 news reports may also have misled U.S.-based readers about the immediate relevance of PMI's stated intention of eventually ending cigarette production by omitting important details about how Marlboro cigarettes are marketed throughout the world. This is because PMI produces and sells Marlboro cigarettes outside of the United States, while Philip Morris USA, a subsidiary of a separate company called Altria, produces and sells Marlboro cigarettes within the United States. While Altria has made some movement into the development of smoke-free alternatives to conventional cigarettes, it has not announced a strategy of ultimately ceasing all production of cigarettes in the same way that PMI has. (en)
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