Category: News This Week

Campaigners in the U.K. who opposed the introduction of standardized tobacco packaging are celebrating following the government’s announcement that it has abandoned—for the time being—moves to introduce such packaging.

“We are delighted,” said Hands Off Our Packs campaigner Angela Harbutt. “The government conducted a public consultation on plain packaging in 2012 and half a million people opposed the measure.

“Ministers have listened to ordinary people. This is good news for those who believe in consumer freedom and are opposed to excessive regulation.

“It is vital that the government now represents the opinion of the British public at European Union level, where unelected bureaucrats are recommending a series of measures that will severely restrict consumer choice on tobacco.”

The Hands Off Our Packs campaign is owned and managed by Forest (Freedom Organisation for the Right to Enjoy Smoking Tobacco). Forest is supported by British American Tobacco, Imperial Tobacco Ltd. and Gallaher Ltd. (a member of the Japan Tobacco Group of Companies).

But while Harbutt was celebrating, she still found time to criticize the use of taxpayers’ money to support anti-tobacco campaigns. “We faced a vast state-funded campaign in favor of restricting branding on cigarette packaging, but hundreds of thousands of consumers fought back,” she said.

“Taxpayer-funded groups claiming to represent the public have no genuine support base and are wholly reliant on government grants.

“We are pleased that their hysterical and self-serving demands have in this instance been rejected.”

Forest said that, according to the government’s summary report of the public consultation, 665,989 campaign responses were received from 24 separate campaigns. Around two-thirds of campaign responses received were from people who were opposed to the introduction of standardized packaging (a total of 427,888 responses) and one-third of campaign responses received were from people who supported standardized packaging (238,101 responses).

“We’ve done the maths and including what the Government calls ‘detailed’ responses (2,424 in total), 64 percent of respondents are opposed to plain packaging,” Forest said in a press note. “Of course our opponents are trying to ignore the public response (odd, since it was a public consultation) and are focusing on the fact that 53 percent of the ‘detailed’ responses support plain packaging.
“Actually, that’s hardly a ringing endorsement for standardized packaging, especially when a quick glance at the report reveals the large number of state sector organizations that submitted a ‘detailed’ response.”

The report is available at https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/standardised-packaging-of-tobacco-products.

If Australia wins the international litigation on plain packaging of cigarettes, countries of the EU will probably follow its example, according to a Baltic Business Daily story quoting European Commissioner for Health Tonio Borg.

“I believe that, if Australia wins the international litigation, more European states will declare their intention to introduce plain packaging,” Borg said after a meeting of EU health ministers in Vilnius, Lithuania.

There was no mention of what Borg thought would happen if Australia lost the litigation, or, indeed, if standardized packaging proved ineffective.

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.

Tobacco manufacturers have filed a number of complaints against Australia.

Among EU countries, Ireland is the only one to have announced its intention to follow the Australian example.

The European Parliament’s environment, public health and food safety committee has voted to back the European Commission’s proposal to classify electronic cigarettes as medicinal products.

For many people, this proposal is the most health-negative of the raft of proposed revisions to the Tobacco Products Directive put forward by the commission at the end of last year.

In its response to the proposed revisions, Parliament’s legal affairs committee said, in part, that Article 18 prohibited nicotine-containing products such as electronic cigarettes containing a certain nicotine level if they were not authorized pursuant to the Medicinal Products Directive. “It is, however, quite unclear if these products (which are much less harmful than tobacco products) even fall under the scope of the Medicinal Products Directive,” the committee said. “For products which do not fall under the Directive, this would effectively constitute a ban. Banning products which are less harmful than tobacco products and which can be a means of smoking cessation is certainly not in line with the public health aims of the proposal.”

Before Wednesday’s vote by the environment committee, a group of vapers wrote an open letter to the chairman of the environment committee, Matthias Groote, calling for a rethink on the proposal for regulating electronic cigarettes.

The group said that for 5 million to 7 million people within the EU, electronic cigarettes had provided and continued to provide a viable alternative to smoking tobacco cigarettes.

And it asked Groote and his committee to imagine how many lives could be saved if electronic cigarettes were allowed to continue to flourish.

However, the group expressed concern that what it called this positive story was about to come to an abrupt halt because of the commission’s proposal. “By regulating e-cigarettes as a medicinal product, and by banning flavours, the Commission and its supporters in Parliament and Council are effectively banning e-cigarettes, as the Parliament’s own Legal Affairs Committee has made clear,” it said.

The group made the point that whereas electronic cigarettes were safe, tobacco cigarettes killed 700,000 people in the EU each year and neither the commission nor Parliament were proposing to ban them.

In fact, the commission and the environment committee are proposing that some cigarettes should be banned: slim cigarettes and those with characterizing flavors, including menthol.

It also voted in favor of graphic warnings covering 75 percent of the fronts and backs of cigarette packs, though it did not accept a proposed amendment seeking the imposition of standardized tobacco packs.

The proposals still have to go before a plenary session of Parliament.

Japan Tobacco Inc.’s domestic cigarette sales volume during June, at 9.5 billion, was down by 4.2 percent on its June 2012 volume, 9.9 billion, which itself was up by 10.7 percent on that of June 2011, according to preliminary figures issued by the company today.

Volume during April-June, at 29.3 billion, was down by 0.2 percent on that of April-June 2012, 29.4 billion, which itself was up by 59.5 percent on that of April-June 2011.

JT’s market share stood at 60.7 percent in June, at 60.5 percent during April-June, and at 59.6 percent for the full year to the end of March.

JT’s domestic cigarette revenue during June, at ¥52.1 billion, was down by 4.3 percent on its June 2012 revenue, ¥54.4 billion.

Revenue during April-June, at ¥160.9 billion, was down by 0.5 percent on that of April-June 2012, ¥161.8 billion.

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&.