PMI to end ‘smoke’ trade
Cigarette maker Philippine Morris International (PMI) has pushed the use of heated tobacco technology to totally phase out conventional cigarettes.
During the virtual 27th National Public Relations Congress, PMI vice president for Global Communications Tommaso di Giovanni discussed efforts to replace all cigarettes with alternatives based on science as soon as possible, as he admitted smoking causes diseases and are indeed addictive.
Based on the study done by the World Health Organization (WHO), it’s estimated that by 2025, there will be the same number of smokers around the world, because smokers don’t quit.
Di Giovanni expressed that this prompted PMI to explore “creative solutions to the problem and rethinking of the possibilities to change their enterprise and provide smokers a better alternative.
“If you smoke, quit. And if you don’t quit, change. Because today, there are options that are much better choices for smokers,” Di Giovanni urged.
Burn passe
“We started working at products that do not burn and therefore generate significantly lower levels of harmful compounds. We call them heated tobacco. And that has been our focus since then,” he said.
Di Giovanni said that currently, more than 350 studies by PMI were initiated to craft these new products which have gone through peer-review, making PMI the fifth largest holder of patents filed with the European Patent office.
“Today, 99 percent of our R&D (research and development) expenditures and 76 percent of our commercial expenditures are behind this huge effort to transform an industry into something that is much better, and we hope that it would not only be our company but the whole industry and the whole world that are behind it,” he said.
With this, Di Giovanni said PMI has already invested over $8 billion in research and development, scientific substantiation and early manufacturing of alternatives to cigarettes.
Option unveiled
In 2015, PMI commercialized IQOS, a product that heats tobacco rather than burning it.
The US Food and Drug Administration last year authorized IQOS for commercialization with claims of modified exposure.
Currently, there are almost 18 million smokers worldwide who have switched to PMI’s heated tobacco products and about 25 percent of PMI’s revenues already come from these better alternatives to cigarettes today.
“Today, our leading heated tobacco product IQOS is sold in 64 countries around the globe. Almost 18 million smokers use (IQOS), and 72 percent of them have abandoned cigarettes completely. We’re now expanding the portfolio because we also know that smokers have different preferences,” Di Giovanni said.