South Korea’s KT&G is increasingly being seen as a rising star in the tobacco-markets firmament, according to a story in The Korea Herald.
The company’s overseas sales reached 46.5 billion cigarettes last year, exceeding domestic sales of 40.6 billion cigarettes for the first time.
KT&G officials say that it is the super-slim, low-tar Esse brand of cigarettes that has been one major contributor to the company’s ‘sprawling growth’ in sales.
In 1999, three years before the company was privatized, overseas cigarette sales stood at 2.6 billion, whereas by 2012 they had reached 40.7 billion.
Holding a leadership position in the Middle East and Central Asia, where a number of global tobacco producers faced setbacks, paved the way for KT&G to “gear up overseas marketing,” an official said.
KT&G is now said to be ratcheting up its business by selling in, for instance, the US, and countries of Africa, Latin America and the Asia-Pacific, where nearly 40 percent of last year’s overseas profits were made.
The company’s marketing pitch has been to promote a variety of super-slim, low-tar cigarettes. Time worked in the US while Esse appealed to smokers in the Asia-Pacific region.