As early as July 2021, with COVID-19 in full force, Philip Morris International announced that it was quitting the cigarette business in the United Kingdom in 10 years. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anybody, considering the general decline in cigarette smoking worldwide in the last 50 years.
Cigarette smoking’s heydays were in the 1960s and 1970s. In a report by Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser titled, “Smoking,” published online at OurWorldInData.org., they noted that sales data from 1875 to 2015 indicated worldwide sales of cigarettes to adult smokers in wealthy countries peaked from around 1962 to 1974. Since then, sales have been falling.
And this decline in sales is the result of several factors: bans on tobacco advertising; increasing taxes on cigarette or tobacco sales; more smoking-related cancer deaths, etc. “The rise, peak then decline of smoking in rich countries took around a century. A long trajectory with severe health impacts,” wrote Ritchie and Roser.
“The positive news is that… smoking is already falling in most countries today… the share of adults who smoke has declined in most countries in the world over the past decade. This is a surprising fact to many, since it means smoking prevalence is not only falling in high-income countries, but also at low-to-middle incomes,” they wrote.
They noted that “low-to-middle income countries have effectively ‘leapfrogged’ the century-long rise-peak-decline pathway of rich countries. Almost everywhere, smoking is on the decline.” As a result, “in poor countries, where fewer people were smoking in the past, tobacco is responsible for a much smaller fraction of cancer deaths… Globally more than one in five cancer deaths (22% in 2016) are attributed to smoking… In most richer countries the share is higher — the average in high-income countries is 28% in 2016.”
This, in a way, partly explains why “the iconic Marlboro cigarette brand will disappear from UK shelves within 10 years,” as reported the Financial Times (FT) in July 2021 through Jonathan Eley, quoting Philip Morris International tobacco group CEO Jacek Olczak. The tobacco executive was also quoted by FT as saying that “the ‘problem of smoking’ could be solved in the UK within ‘10 years maximum’… as part of a broader effort supported by regulation.”
He was also quoted as telling the UK-based news website the Daily Mail that the company strategy “absolutely means stopping selling traditional cigarettes in the UK,” and that the Marlboro brand of cigarettes would “disappear” from that market. Company revenues from the UK were estimated at about £800 million a year.
To date, Philip Morris is already invested heavily in nicotine alternatives, including electronic cigarettes that heat rather than burn tobacco. “Globally, the company derives almost a quarter of its revenue from alternative products, a much higher proportion than rivals such as Altria and Imperial Tobacco,” FT reported. The company has also “committed itself to earning half its revenue from non-smoking products.”
Quoting Philip Morris Chief Financial Officer Emmanuel Babeau, “We believe in, and we are going to contribute to, cigarettes being phased out.” FT noted that the “commitment to phase out traditional cigarettes in the UK is also partly driven by consumer and investor behavior, and government policy. Smoking rates in the country are already comparatively low while cigarettes are heavily taxed and, since 2016, are sold in plain packaging.”
Hannah Ritchie’s and Max Roser’s “Smoking” report in OurWorldInData.org. noted that “tobacco smoking has already been one of the world’s largest health problems for many decades. Over the course of the 20th century, it killed around 100 million people, most of them in today’s rich countries. The health burdens of smoking are now moving from high-income to low-to-middle income countries; some estimates have suggested that one billion people could die from tobacco over the 21st century.”
This finding is particularly important to Asian countries like the Philippines as the authors also noted that “there are a number of countries where at least 40% of population smoke, if not more. The places where many people smoke are clustered in two regions. South-East Asia and the Pacific islands and Europe — particularly the Balkan region — but also France, Germany, and Austria.”
But based on historical precedents, and available data, the way to fight the tobacco plague is not rocket science. The authors noted that “taxing cigarettes, bans on advertising, and support to help quit smoking are all critical to accelerate the decline of smoking.” In this line, local regulatory effort should be focused on these three main areas, while at the same time making it more difficult to access cigarettes and tobacco products and alternatives, particularly the youth’s access.
I hope our policymakers, legislators, and regulators are taking note of worldwide trends and developments in the tobacco industry and global tobacco consumption, as well as the obvious growth in the sale of tobacco alternatives. Philip Morris decision to end Marlboro sales in the UK in 10 years should be viewed positively, and be seen as indicative of the industry’s shift.
As such, policies and regulation of tobacco and its alternatives like electronic cigarettes deserve further study and scrutiny, especially in the areas of taxation, advertising or marketing, support for smoking cessation, and shouldering healthcare costs for smoking-related illnesses and diseases.
Regulation of tobacco and tobacco alternatives should not just adjust to the times. For once, maybe regulation can be ahead of the curve rather than always playing catch-up. Instead of calibrating to industry trends, perhaps regulators can actually set the path and thus make the industry follow its lead to a smoke-free environment and a healthier population.
Marvin Tort is a former managing editor of BusinessWorld, and a former chairman of the Philippine Press Council