French households cut back slightly on their consumption in October, mainly in response to a rise in cigarette prices, according to an Agence France Presse story quoting official data.
Consumption, a main driver of growth in the French economy, slipped by 0.2 per cent in October from the September level.
The INSEE statistics institute said that a rise in purchases of durable goods in October had not compensated for a sharp fall in spending on cigarettes following a tax hike.
Alcoholic beverages, tobacco products and illicit drugs are set to be the most valuable contraband seized byMalaysia’s Customs Department this year, according to a story in The Star.
Of the RM850 million worth of goods seized in the first 11 months of this year, alcohol, tobacco and drugs accounted for RM450 million.
Alcohol and tobacco are always going to be high on the list because the ‘worth’ of contraband products is taken to include the duties and taxes that should have been paid on them.
Customs director-general, Datuk Seri Khazali Ahmad, said that demand for contraband alcoholic beverages and tobacco products was “high and consistent.”
“Cigarettes and alcoholic beverages are the popular items as duties imposed on them are high, making them a lot more expensive in the open market,” he said at the opening of a Customs office in Seremban by Deputy Finance Minister, Datuk Donald Lim.
Malaysia’s Health Minister, Datuk Seri Liow Tiong Lai, has said that the tar nicotine and carbon monoxide deliveries of cigarettes sold in Malaysia would be lowered in September 2013 and then reduced again a year later, according to a story in The Sun Daily.
But a research company has called for a slow and gradual reduction in deliveries to allow smokers to adapt to the change.
OSK Research said that an abrupt reduction in deliveries would likely lead to smokers consuming more cigarettes or to them switching to illicit products with higher tar and nicotine levels. ‘We think both scenarios defeat the purpose of promoting a healthier population,’ it said.
OSK Research added that it saw a challenging regulatory environment for the tobacco industry, especially after the general election.
‘The government is looking to expand no-smoking zones in the country, although the most immediate regulatory risk could be the resumption of tobacco excise duty hikes come the 2014 budget announcement,” it said.
The NewCo Group said on Friday that Raza Ullah Khan had recently joined its global team as country manager in Pakistan.
Khan has worked in the tobacco business for more than 35 years.
NewCo said that Khan’s experience and knowledge would give it a strong presence in the Pakistani market.
Ethiopia’s National Tobacco Enterprise (NTE) is trying to obtain funding for the purchase of a new cigarette-making machine to produce 20,000 cigarettes a minute, according to a story by Mahlet Mesfin for the Addis Fortune.
The cost of the machine is said to be about 142 million birr (US$7.79 million).
NTE, which started production with a single machine in 1941, now has two machines that were bought in 2003 and that are capable of manufacturing 7,000 cigarettes per minute, according to Ayele Alebel, NTE’s public relations officer.
“We can neither satisfy the demand with our current capacity nor be competitive in the market with the current machines,” he said.
Though the enterprise has the exclusive right to manufacture and distribute tobacco products in the country, it has only a 62 per cent market share, with the rest of the being held by illicit products.
The NTE believes demand this year is probably about 6.5 billion cigarettes, while currently it is producing only 3.7 billion.
The full story is at: http://addisfortune.net/articles/profitable-tobacco-enterprise-seeks-100m-br-loan-for-new-machine/.
Swedish Match has attacked reported European plans to further legislate on snus as an indirect attempt to ban the product, according to a Reuters story quoting the newspaper Dagens Nyheter.
The newspaper quoted what it said was draft legislation by the European Commission [the tobacco products directive] that sought to restrict the use of flavorings in snus.
Swedish Match spokesman, Johan Wredberg, said he had not seen the new commission proposal, but added that, if the report were accurate, it showed the EU aimed to ban snus inSweden– sales are banned elsewhere in the EU – by the back door.
To allowSwedenan exemption from the ban but then to make manufacturing impossible could be interpreted only as a way to try to ban snus inSweden, he said.
Wredberg said banning or restricting the use of flavors would mean Swedish Match could not produce snus the way it wanted to and in a way that was best for consumers.
The proposed law would allow national regulators to decide if flavouring levels were too high, but would allow the commission to intervene ‘if necessary’, the newspaper reported.
Ohio is one of four US states that have budgeted no funds for tobacco prevention programs this year, according to a Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids (CTFK) press note issued through PRNewswire.
‘This is the third year in a row that Ohio has provided zero state funding for tobacco prevention,’ the note said.
‘The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDCP] recommends that Ohio provide $145 million a year for tobacco prevention programs.’
Ohio this year will collect $1.1 billion in revenue from the 1998 tobacco settlement and tobacco taxes.
These figures form part of the annual report on states’ funding of tobacco prevention programs, titled ‘Broken Promises to Our Children: The 1998 State Tobacco Settlement 14 Years Later’, which was released by the CTFK, the American Heart Association, the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network, the American Lung Association, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Americans for Nonsmokers’ Rights.
The other states that tied with Ohio at the bottom of the funding league were New Jersey, New Hampshire and North Carolina.
But the report finds that most states are failing adequately to fund tobacco prevention and cessation programs.
It says that states this year will collect $25.7 billion from the tobacco settlement and tobacco taxes, but will spend just 1.8 per cent of it – $459.5 million – on tobacco prevention programs. This means the states are spending less than two cents of every dollar in tobacco revenue to fight tobacco use.
Overall, the states are said to be falling ‘woefully short’ of the CDCP’s recommended funding levels for tobacco prevention programs.
British American Tobacco Chile has been fined US$1.7 million for anti-competitive practices, according to a story by Emily Green for the Santiago Times.
In addition, Chile’s Supreme Court has imposed further restrictions on the company’s business practices.
BAT Chile currently accounts for 93 per cent of domestic tax-paid cigarette sales.
Iggesund Paperboard’s Black Box Project has broken yet new ground with the formation of a website through which the contents of the latest box can be traded.
For almost two years, Iggesund Paperboard has been operating the Black Box Project through which it has challenged a number of well-known international designers and design companies to fill a black box of a specified format with contents that in some way test the limits of Iggesund’s Invercote paperboard. The designers’ works have then been shown at exhibitions in Paris, London, Amsterdam, Hamburg, Milan and New York.
The latest project, unveiled during an exhibition at the Flacon Design Factory in Moscow
last night, saw the Swedish photographer and filmmaker, Jens Assur, present a work based on city portraits.
A hundred years ago, the world had only one city with more than a million inhabitants –London. Today there are more than a hundred such cities and 25 metropolises with over 10 million inhabitants. And the migration and urbanisation behind this growth formed the starting point for Assur’s contribution to the Black Box Project.
“Do the inhabitants of Tokyo have more in common with those of London, New York and Stockholmthan with people living in rural Japan?” was one question posed by Assur in the 30 photographic portraits of cities that are his contribution to the project. “Do metropolises create cultures that stretch far beyond national borders and language barriers?”
The portraits, which are printed on Invercote, were divided up into smaller tiles and then randomly distributed among the black boxes; so box owners can create their own individual metropolis with the tiles, while anyone wishing to exchange tiles can do so via a dedicated website: blackbox.iggesund.com/trade.
Many of the people who will be in possession of the boxes and, therefore, likely to trade the tiles, are designers who work with paper and board; so, once again, this brave – almost shot-in-the-dark project – has come up trumps.
As Carlo Einarsson, director market communications at Iggesund Paperboard, has pointed out, the Black Box Project is not a traditional advertising campaign in which the client expresses detailed wishes and closely supervises the project’s execution. The participating designers have great freedom. The only restrictions are that they must work with Invercote and create something that reflects their own distinctiveness and Invercote’s possibilities.
“The degree of freedom combined with the opportunity to create something extraordinary has made it easy to find interested participants,” he says. “A number of designers have contacted us and asked to be part of the project. We’re very satisfied with the response so far, both to our exhibitions and to our web pages about the project.
“In a world where the choice of materials is unfortunately often a matter of habit, it’s important for us to showcase the extra possibilities which Invercote offers designers to fully realise their creative ambitions.”
Assur began his career as a photographer for the daily press. In the 1990s he wasSweden’s top award-winning photojournalist. Since then he has turned to film making, and his films, including The Last Dog inRwandaand Killing the Chickens to Scare the Monkeys, have won multiple international awards. Partly due to this success, at the beginning of 2012 he was the first Scandinavian to win the Sundance/NHK International Filmmaker Award, the Sundance Festival’s prize for promising filmmakers.
“When I was asked to take part in the Black Box Project I didn’t hesitate a second,” he said. “As a creative artist, it’s rare that I have the opportunity to work so freely and at such a high artistic level in a customer-initiated project. But in this case we could do so on both a conceptual and intellectual level.”
US states have spent less on tobacco prevention during the past two years than in any period since the national tobacco settlement in 1998, despite record high revenues from the settlement and tobacco taxes, according to a story by Sabrina Tavernise for the New York Times quoting a report due for release today.
The states are on track to collect a record $25.7 billion in tobacco taxes and settlement money in the current fiscal year, but they are set to spend less than two per cent of that on prevention, according to the report by the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. The report’s figures come from state appropriations for the fiscal year ending in June.
The settlement awarded states an estimated $246 billion over its first 25 years. It gave states complete discretion over the money, and many use it for programs unrelated to tobacco or to plug budget holes.
Public health experts say it lacks a mechanism for ensuring that some portion of the money is set aside for tobacco prevention and cessation programs. “There weren’t even gums, let alone teeth,” Timothy McAfee, the director of the Office on Smoking and Health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDCP), said, referring to the allocation of funds for tobacco prevention and cessation in the terms of the settlement.
Tobacco use is the number one cause of preventable death in theUS, killing more than 400,000 people every year, according to the CDCP.
The full story is at: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/06/health/antismoking-outlays-drop-despite-tobacco-revenue.html?emc=tnt&tntemail0=y&_r=0.