A tobacco giant is restructuring their company to focus investments on vaping technologies in an effort to compete globally.
British American Tobacco (BAT) announced Thursday they are shaking up their internal structure to integrate their alternative smoking devices with their traditional products. The goal is to elevate e-cigarettes into the mainstream and challenge competitors like Philip Morris International, who are currently eating up large chunks of Asian tobacco markets with new technologies, reports Yahoo News.
BAT completed their acquisition of Reynolds American July 25, which added VUSE e-cigarettes to their product portfolio.
“Now that we have built a successful NGP (next generation products) business which is poised for substantial growth, we will be fully integrating NGP to leverage the scale and expertise of the whole group to drive growth in an area that is fast becoming a key part of our mainstream business,” representatives at BAT said in a statement to Yahoo News.
In addition to the line of VUSE products, BAT manufactures the Vype e-cigarette brand and a heat-not-burn device called glo. Glo is a response to the iQOS device manufactured by PMI, which heats tobacco instead of liquid nicotine. Tobacco sticks, which resemble small cigarettes, are inserted into the heating device for use.
PMI announced Aug. 24 approximately 3 million smokers in Singapore have transitioned off cigarettes to the iQOS. The company says more than 232,000 smokers across the world ditched cigarettes for the iQOS device in July, or roughly 8,000 people a day.
The iQOS device debuted in Japan last year and is proving a smash hit in the country. Sales are outperforming PMI’s expectations, accounting for 7.1 percent of Japan’s overall tobacco sales as of the first quarter of 2017.
Evidence suggests that because the majority of cancer-causing chemicals are inhaled through smoke, e-cigarettes eliminate up to 95 percent of the risk. Recent research evaluating the impact of heat-not-burn devices on overall health are bolstering their image as a harm reduction product that can help move smokers away from traditional cigarettes.
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