Altria invests $2.75B in rival startup NJOY

Move comes shortly after it dropped Juul stake

Days after exiting its stake in troubled electronic cigarette maker Juul, Altria announced a $2.75 billion investment in rival electronic cigarette startup NJOY.

The Marlboro maker gets full ownership of NJOY’S e-vapor product portfolio, the Virginia company said Monday, including its pod-based e-vapor product ACE.

“We believe we can responsibly accelerate U.S. adult smoker and competitive adult vaper adoption of NJOY ACE in ways that NJOY could not as a standalone company,” Altria CEO Billy Gifford said.

The agreement includes an additional $500 million in cash payments contingent upon regulatory approval of some products by NJOY Holdings Inc., based in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Altria’s announcement comes just days after the company said it was swapping its minority stake in Juul Labs for a license to some of Juul’s heated tobacco intellectual property.

Altria said that the carrying value and estimated fair value of its Juul investment was $250 million at the end of last year. The company will record the financial impact of the agreement in the first quarter of 2023 and plans to treat any amounts as a special item and exclude it from adjusted diluted earnings per share.

Juul said Friday when Altria exited its stake that it now has “full strategic freedom” to pursue other partnerships.

Gifford said the swap was the right decision for Altria.

“Juul faces significant regulatory and legal challenges and uncertainties, many of which could exist for many years,” Gifford said.

In December Juul reached settlements covering thousands of lawsuits over its e-cigarettes.

The company faced more than 8,000 lawsuits brought by individuals and families of Juul users, school districts, city governments and Native American tribes. The settlement resolved most of those cases, which had been consolidated in a California federal court pending several bellwether trials.

Financial terms of the settlement were not disclosed.