Author: Staff Writer

Philip Morris International Inc. is due to host a live audio webcast at www.pmi.com/webcasts starting at 9 a.m. Eastern Time on July 18 to discuss its 2013 second-quarter results, which will be issued about 7 a.m. on the same day.

During the webcast, which will be in listen-only mode, CFO Jacek Olczak will discuss the company’s results and answer questions from the investment community.

An archived copy of the webcast will be available until 5 p.m. on Aug. 16 at www.pmi.com/webcasts.

The presentation slides and script will be available at www.pmi.com/earnings.

Lorillard is due to host a conference call for analysts and investors from 09.00 hours on July 25, after it has announced its second-quarter 2013 results.

The conference call will be hosted by Chairman, President and CEO Murray S. Kessler and Executive Vice President, Finance and Planning, and CFO David H. Taylor.

The conference call numbers are (888) 239-6824 (domestic) and (706) 902-3787 (international), and the pass code is 17148286.

A news release and a live webcast of the conference call will be available under the Investor Relations section of Lorillard’s website at www.lorillard.com.

And the conference call will be available for replay in its entirety through Aug. 1 at  (855) 859-2056 (domestic) and (404) 537-3406 (international) using the pass code 17148286.

Reynolds American Inc.’s board of directors has declared a quarterly cash dividend on the company’s common stock of $0.63 per share ($2.52 per share annualized).

The dividend will be payable on Oct. 1 to shareholders of record on Sept. 10.

In announcing the dividend, RAI said it was the 37th consecutive quarterly cash dividend that it had declared since it became a public company on July 30, 2004.

RAI’s policy is to return about 80 percent of the company’s current-year net income to shareholders in the form of dividends.

A recent report claims that “substantial progress” has been made in global tobacco control since the adoption of the World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) 10 years ago.

This is despite the fact that the conclusions to the report’s executive summary admit that two-thirds of the world’s population are not fully protected in respect of any of the WHO’s MPOWER measures. These measures are said to correspond to one or more of the demand reduction provisions included in the WHO FCTC: monitor tobacco use and prevention policies; protect people from tobacco smoke; offer help to quit tobacco use; warn people about the dangers of tobacco; enforce bans on tobacco advertising, promotion and sponsorship; and raise taxes on tobacco.

“Substantial progress has been made in global tobacco control since adoption of the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control ten years ago,” according to the executive summary conclusions to the WHO report on the global tobacco epidemic, 2013.

“Since WHO introduced the six demand reduction measures (MPOWER) in 2008 in line with the WHO FCTC, the number of countries successfully establishing one or more of the measures at the highest level of achievement and the number of people covered by those measures have more than doubled.

“Today, about one-third of the world’s population is now covered by at least one of the measures at the highest level (not including monitoring). An additional 3 billion people are covered by national mass-media campaigns. As a result, hundreds of millions of tobacco users are protected from the harms of tobacco by governments to improve their health and the health of others, and hundreds of millions of nonsmokers are less likely to start. Despite this progress, significant gaps remain in establishing effective tobacco control measures in most countries.

“Much more remains to be done to ensure that recent successes in tobacco control can be further expanded. Even as the number of countries establishing complete tobacco control measures has increased, more than half do not yet provide high-level protection for their people on any measure. And while the number of people covered by high-level measures has increased substantially, two-thirds of the world’s population have yet to be fully protected in any one area, let alone all of them.

“The successes demonstrated by many countries in using demand reduction measures to build capacity to implement the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control show that it is possible to effectively address the tobacco epidemic and save lives, regardless of size or income. However, efforts to incorporate all provisions of the WHO Framework Convention into national tobacco control programmes must be accelerated in all countries to save even more lives.”

The full report and executive summary are at http://www.who.int/tobacco/global_report/2013/en/index.html.

The introduction of standardized tobacco packs in Australia has caused some smokers to complain that the cigarettes inside taste worse than they did previously, according to a piece by Matt Siegel in The New York Times.

Since Dec. 1, Australia has required that all tobacco products be sold in packaging designed on behalf of the government to be as ugly as possible. Packs are hugely dominated by graphic health warnings, are otherwise a standard olive color, have no logos or other design features, and have brand and variant names in a standardized font and position.

The Australian health minister, Tanya Plibersek, told Siegel in an interview it would be a number of years before she could say whether the introduction of the packs had reduced smoking rates and improved health.

However, commenting on the complaints about the taste of the cigarettes, Plibersek said there had been no reformulation of the product.

“It was just that people being confronted with the ugly packaging made the psychological leap to disgusting taste,” she said.

Siegel’s story is at: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/11/business/global/law-spoils-tobaccos-taste-australians-say.html?emc=tnt&tntemail0=y&_r=1&.

A computer glitch involving the U.S.’ new health-care law might mean that some smokers next year won’t bear the full cost of tobacco-user penalties that would have made their premiums much higher than those of nonsmokers, according to a blog by Anne Carrns in The New York Times, quoting an Associated Press report.

The Obama administration has notified insurers that a computer system problem will limit penalties that the law says the companies may charge smokers.

Fixing the problem is expected to take at least a year.

“This is a temporary circumstance that in no way impacts our ability to open the marketplaces on Oct. 1, when millions of Americans will be able to purchase quality, affordable insurance for the first time,” said Joanne Peters, a spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services, in an emailed statement.

Starting in 2014, the law requires insurance companies to accept all applicants regardless of pre-existing medical problems.

But it also allows them to charge smokers up to 50 percent higher premiums to ward off bad risks.

For an older smoker, the cost of the full penalty could be prohibitive.

Reynolds American Inc. is due to host a webcast and conference call following the release of its second-quarter 2013 financial results before the market opens on July 24.

The webcast, at www.reynoldsamerican.com, and the conference call, on (877) 390-5533 (toll-free) and (678) 894-3969 (international), which will be in listen-only mode, are due to begin at 9 a.m. Eastern Time.

The speakers will be President and CEO Daniel M. Delen, CFO Thomas R. Adams and Vice President of Investor Relations Morris L. Moore.

Webcast registration is now available at www.reynoldsamerican.com.

It will not come as much of a surprise to many tobacco people, but the evidence supporting the need to ban smoking on beaches or in parks is virtually nonexistent, according to Ronald Bayer, a professor at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.

Speaking on PBS (Public Broadcasting Service television) about an article in Health Affairs (abstract at: http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/32/7/1291.abstract), of which he was the lead author, Bayer said that he had discovered the evidence was really weak. The evidence of harm to nonsmokers on the beach or in a park from someone smoking was virtually nonexistent.

The evidence that fish and birds were dying because of cigarette butts was virtually nonexistent.

And even the evidence that seeing someone smoking in a park or on a beach would encourage kids to smoke was extremely weak.

At the end of the abstract, the authors ask the question: What, then, accounts for the efforts to impose such bans?

“We conclude that the impetus is the imperative to denormalize smoking as part of a broader public health campaign to reduce tobacco-related illness and death,” the abstract says.

“Although invoking limited evidence may prove effective in the short run, it is hazardous for public health policymakers, for whom public trust is essential.”

A transcript of the PBS broadcast is at http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2013/07/the-real-reasons-behind-public-smoking-bans.html.

Analysts at Canaccord Genuity have downgraded their recommendations on British American Tobacco and Imperial Tobacco because of the growth in sales of electronic cigarettes, according to a piece by Nick Fletcher in The Guardian, quoting Canaccord’s Eddy Hargreaves and Alicia Forry.

The analysts were quoted as saying that they believed electronic cigarettes would prove to be the most significant development in the history of the organized tobacco industry, stretching back some 200 years. Consumers worldwide would migrate from tobacco smoking to electronic cigarettes at an accelerating rate through 2020.

Hargreaves and Forry estimated that the electronic cigarette market would grow from $2 billion in 2012 to $3 billion in 2013 (tobacco is approximately $700 billion).

In the longer term, the total combined market would shrink at a more rapid rate than most investors envisaged as electronic cigarettes weaned smokers off tobacco but did not attract new users into the overall category.

The critical question seems to be whether, in the short- to medium-term, at least, the tobacco cigarette sector continues to attract the insouciant young as new users, and that they migrate to electronic cigarettes as they become more mature.

Fletcher’s piece is at http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/marketforceslive/2013/jul/09/electronic-cigarettes-british-american-imperial.

India’s Union Territory of Puducherry, formerly Pondicherry, has banned the sale, storage, distribution and manufacture of the chewing tobacco products gutkha and pan masala for one year, according to a story in the latest issue of the BBM Bommidala Newsletter.

The banning order, made under the provisions of the Food Safety and Standards Act 2006, prohibits any foodstuff from containing tobacco.