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Philip Morris International Inc. (NYSE / Euronext Paris: PM) announces that Frederic de Wilde, President of Philip Morris Japan, will provide investors with a review of Japan’s cigarette market dynamics at the Citi Investment Research Asia Tobacco Field Trip in Tokyo, Japan, on Monday, March 8, and that Roman Militsyn, Managing Director of Philip Morris Korea, will provide a similar review of South Korea’s cigarette market dynamics on Wednesday, March 10, in Seoul, South Korea.

The presentations may contain projections of future results and other forward-looking statements that involve a number of risks and uncertainties and are made pursuant to the Safe Harbor Provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995.

March 6th, 2010 | Category: International Cigarettes | Leave a comment

Philip Morris International believes Uruguay is Marlboro Country. On February 19, the tobacco giant filed a lawsuit against that country, charging that new health measures involving cigarette packaging amount to unfair treatment of the company.

Uruguay’s new legislation, submitted in June 2009 and expected to go into effect in March 2010, requires that 80 percent of each side of cigarette boxes be covered by graphic images of the possible detrimental health effects of smoking. The company argues that the law limits the space for branding and thus infringes on its intellectual property rights.

These requirements are nothing new in Uruguay or elsewhere in the world. . . .

Ironically, the U.S.-based Philip Morris is filing its claim under a bilateral investment treaty between Uruguay and Switzerland, even though that European country became the most recent nation to adopt strict cigarette packaging rules on January 1, 2010.

Philip Morris has its headquarters in New York but its operations center in Lausanne, Switzerland. The firm is famous for Marlboros (the world’s top-selling cigarette) and controls around 15 percent of the international cigarette market outside the United States.

This case echoes many others currently underway in developing regions, where powerful corporations from the developed north seek to take advantage of “investor protections,” under trade agreements and bilateral investment treaties, to ensure profits at any cost. Such claims are decided by international arbitration tribunals that cannot force a country to repeal its laws but can award massive compensation to the foreign investor.

Philip Morris’s lawsuit is a logical step in the tobacco industry’s aggressive push toward new markets . . .

All nations should be allowed to implement legislation they believe protects their population’s health — without having to face expensive lawsuits from global corporations. Philip Morris’s suit is just the latest in the tobacco industry’s long history of abuse of power.

March 6th, 2010 | Category: International Cigarettes | Leave a comment

The Habanos group, producer of popular Cuban cigar brands such as Cohiba and Romeo y Julieta, registered a turnover of 0 million in 2009, an 8 percent decline that is not lost on Czech cigar distributor Peter Forman.

“I’ve seen a 10 percent to 15 percent fall in midrange cigars and a 30 percent fall in lower end, machine-made cigars,” he said.

Cigar culture has become increasingly popular in the Czech Republic since 1995, when Forman became the first importer and distributor of Cuban cigars in the country. Thanks in part to Forman’s marketing efforts, cigar bars and humidors have popped up throughout Prague as business culture embraces the experience of a Cuban cigar, the most popular of which sell for between 700 K? and 1,000 K?.

“Once we began introducing Cuban cigars to middle and high society, they became quite popular, and sales increased rapidly,” he said.
Forman remained the largest Cuban cigar distributor on the Czech market until 2006, when Tabak Invest signed an exclusive contract to distribute Habanos cigars in the Czech, Slovak and Hungarian markets. According to Petra Amis, spokeswoman for Tabak Invest, Cuban cigar sales have slumped most significantly in Hungary.

March 5th, 2010 | Category: International Cigarettes | Leave a comment

Objectives. We evaluated the relationship between smoking and adenocarcinoma of the prostate.

Methods. We pooled data from 24 cohort studies enrolling 21579 prostate cancer case participants for a general variance-based meta-analysis. . . .

Conclusions. Observational cohort studies show an association of smoking with prostate cancer incidence and mortality. Ill-defined exposure categories in many cohort studies suggest that pooled data underestimate risk.

March 5th, 2010 | Category: International Cigarettes | Leave a comment

Cigarette smoking may increase a man’s risk for developing and dying from prostate cancer, pooled data from 24 studies involving 21,600 men with the disease indicates.

This study “provides good evidence that prostate cancer is likely a smoking-related tumor,” Dr. Michael Huncharek, at Meta-Analysis Research Group in Columbia, South Carolina, wrote in an email to Reuters Health.

Prostate cancer is the most common of all cancers striking U.S. men. Estimates from 2008 show 186,000 new prostate cancer cases and 28,000 deaths, yet the cause remains elusive.

In the American Journal of Public Health, Huncharek and colleagues report results of their “meta-analysis” . . .

They found “surprisingly consistent evidence,” Huncharek said, that both the chance of developing prostate cancer and dying from prostate cancer increases with smoking, even though many of the studies analyzed used crude smoking classifications.

March 5th, 2010 | Category: International Cigarettes | Leave a comment

The European Court of Justice on Thursday ruled that minimum retail prices for tobacco were illegal under EU law. As a result, France, Ireland and Austria will have to stub out their minimum-price rules. Don’t go rushing to Dublin or Calais with a truck just yet—the taxes that account for most of the cost of a pack of cigarettes through the EU remain in place. It’s just the laws dictating how those costs are passed on that have been ruled out. . . .

Countries that want to drive up the cost of smoking are free under the ruling to continue to do so, and most countries in the EU are well above Brussels’ mandated minimum anyway. But once that level is set, there’s no harm in a little competition for smokers’ business. Many small businesses like these minimum-price laws because they help protect their margins and hence their business from higher-volume competitors. It also keeps the least efficient competitors more comfortable than they deserve to be, while costing consumers money by keeping prices artificially high.

Striking down cigarette price-fixing won’t entirely solve this problem—in some countries in the EU, including France, licenses to sell cigarettes are so tightly regulated that there is little competition anyway. But the ECJ’s ruling reminds us that the EU does best when it’s saving member states from their own worst instincts.

March 5th, 2010 | Category: International Cigarettes | Leave a comment

ANTI-SMOKING group Ash Ireland has called on the Government to increase taxes on cigarettes after the European Court of Justice ruled that Irish legislation which empowers the Government to fix a minimum price for cigarettes violates European law.

In a judgment handed down yesterday, the court found Ireland had breached a directive which sets down rules governing the calculation of excise duty on tobacco products.

The case dates back several years, a period in which requests by the European Commission for information from Dublin sometimes went unheeded. In its ruling, the Luxembourg-based court said Ireland breached its legal obligations under European law by failing to provide data on the legislation to Brussels.

The case arose from proceedings that the European Commission took against Ireland, France and Austria. The commission argued that legislation in all three countries undermined free competition by curtailing the freedom of manufacturers and importers to determine the maximum retail selling prices of their products.

March 5th, 2010 | Category: International Cigarettes | Leave a comment

General Electric Co (GE.N) is known for exporting American products like washing machines and jet engines, and the biggest U.S. conglomerate is getting ready to ship out another American trend — the outdoor smoking ban.

The world’s largest maker of jet engines this week told employees that it plans to ban smoking on all GE property — both indoors and out — worldwide starting in March 2011.

The Fairfield, Connecticut-based company already prohibits indoor smoking at about 80 percent of its 2,000 facilities globally. The new policy aims to extend that ban to apply to all GE property, meaning an assembly-line worker could not have a cigarette while walking from the factory gate to the door.

“We’ve made a commitment to making our employees healthier and it’s a little bit of walking the talk,” said GE spokeswoman Sue Bishop. “It’s due to the overwhelming evidence of the ill-effects of smoking.”

March 4th, 2010 | Category: International Cigarettes | Leave a comment

Health chiefs demanded the Government immediately hike tobacco taxes today after European judges ruled that state-controlled minimum pricing is illegal.

The Irish Cancer Society said the ban by the Luxembourg court could bring down the cost of cigarettes and encourage smoking.

Kathleen O’Meara, the charity’s head of advocacy and communications, called for the Government to act quickly to protect public health policy.

“They must continue to maintain high prices by increasing tax on cigarettes and loose tobacco,” she said.

“Second, they must bring in legislation immediately to prohibit tobacco manufacturers from selling tobacco products at a loss.”

March 4th, 2010 | Category: International Cigarettes | Leave a comment