Iran produced 2.44 million kg of tobacco during the first half of fiscal 2021, 265.3 percent more than during same period last year, reports The Financial Tribune, citing data released by the Ministry of Industries, Mining and Trade.
There are presently 43 tobacco producing factories in Iran, compared with 36 last year, the Iranian Student News Agency (ISNA) reported.
The ministry’s data also show 400,200 kg of hookah tobacco were exported during the first six months of this year, up 445.8 percent rise over the corresponding period of 2020.
Cigarette exports nearly quadrupled from first half of the 2020 Iranian calendar year (March 21-Sept. 22) from the comparable 2021 period, according to The Tehran Times.
Iran exported 275 million cigarettes in the first six months of this year compared to the 71 million in the same period last year, ISNA reported.
The country’s cigarette output rose 14 percent in the first half of this year, to 28.7 billion cigarettes
The Supreme Court of North Carolina has upheld an April 2020 ruling by the N.C. Business Court that Reynolds American Inc. (RAI) provided “fair value” to shareholders who objected to the return they received from Reynolds’ $54.5 billion sale to British American Tobacco, reports The Winston-Salem Journal.
In January 2017, BAT announced it would acquire the 57.8 percent of RAI that it did not already own. BAT acquired a 42.2 percent ownership stake as part of Reynolds’ $4.4 billion purchase of BAT subsidiary Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp. in 2004.
BAT’s initial offer for the remaining shares was valued at $59.64 a share. When the deal closed, the share price value had reached $65.87.
Believing the agreed-upon deal price significantly undervalued Reynolds, a group of dissenting shareholders, led by Third Motion Equities Master Fund, refused to tender their shares at closing. RAI then opted to pay them $59.64 per share plus interest..
The N.C. Business Court ruled that Reynolds “properly determined the ‘fair value’ of shares, saying the amount equaled or exceeded the value of Reynolds shares as of the date of the merger.”
The NC Supreme Court agreed with the Business Court judgment that that no further payments to the dissenters are required.
KT&G has launched its heat-not-burn product Lil in more than 20 markets within two years after signing a supply agreement with Philip Morris International for overseas sales of Lil in early 2020, the South Korean company announced on its website
Last year, KT&G and PMI launched Lil Solid 1.0 in Russia and Ukraine, and Lil Hybrid 2.0 in Japan. This year, the two companies expanded into other markets including Kazakhstan, Serbia and Armenia, with Lil Solid 2.0 as the flagship product. This August, an announcement was made that Lil was launched in a total 10 markets globally, Albania being the latest market at the time.
KT&G added additional markets in the fourth quarter this year. In November, Lil debuted in Guatemala, the first market in Central America, and the company expanded into the Asian market further, launching Lil in Malaysia after Japan. Additionally in the same month, Lil Solid 2.0 and its dedicated stick Fiit were launched in Italy.
Lil Solid 2.0 is a second-generation model of KT&G’s heat-not-burn products. It boasts improved battery performance and induction heating technology, and it comes in two colors, “stone grey” and “cosmic blue” outside Korea.
The dedicated sticks come in a total of eight variants including Fiit Regular and Fiit Crisp, and a new variant, Fiit Alpine, has been launched in the fourth quarter this year. Two to five variants have been launched in each country‒tailored towards consumer taste preference.
“Lil was able to quickly expand internationally thanks to Lil’s innovative technology in addition to PMI’s commercial resources and infrastructure,” said Wang Seop Lim, chief of KT&G’s next-generation products division. “We will continue to provide high quality products to consumers outside Korea through strategic collaboration with PMI going forward.”
Avail Vapor has sold the majority of its retail locations and closed its remaining stores. The company has also sold or closed its ancillary businesses. James Xu, founder of Avail, said the decision was motivated by multiple factors over several years, including what he called unclear and convoluted federal regulatory processes.
At one time, Avail Vapor was the largest family-owned vapor retailer in the U.S. with more than 100 stores in a dozen states. In January 2020, the company split into regulatory compliance and consulting business, and a major wholesale distribution company. Those businesses have also been sold or closed.
Xu said the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s premarket tobacco product application (PMTA) pathway was a major factor in the decision after the agency arbitrarily changed the requirements to get a PMTA approved. “It’s completely just a mess with FDA policy making and policy strategy. It just did not make any sense from day one,” Xu said. “Everything is really in this gray area. It was totally different from what our mission was and Covid is not helping any retailer.”
Xu said Avail spent more than $10 million in its bid to get regulatory approval since 2016, when the FDA set forth new compliance standards for vaping products. But the FDA rejected Avail’s applications in September and the company sued the government agency in federal appeals court. However, the FDA then stayed enforcement of its marketing denial order on Nov. 1, pending an administrative appeal.
The economic impacts of Covid-19 also created challenges for the company, which began downsizing in August when it sold an estimated 30 of its stores to North Carolina-based competitor AMV Holdings, parent to Kure and Madvapes. It then shuttered or sold its remaining 20 stores, including five in the same city as the company’s headquarters, Richmond, Virginia, Xu said in an interview with Richmond Biz Sense.
Avail was an early entry into the vapor market, opening its first stores in 2013. By 2015, the company was producing its own e-liquids in its 37,000-square-foot office and manufacturing facility. It soon began also producing e-liquids for several other major brands. Xu said that he is not leaving the vapor industry and that a new project would be announced soon.
The Philippine Senate on Dec. 16 approved the proposed Vaporized Nicotine Products Regulation Act, reports The Philippine Inquirer.
Senate Bill 2239 transfers regulatory authority over vapor products from the Philippines Food and Drug Administration’s authority to the Department of Trade and Industry.
According to Vaping360, the move was prompted partly by outrage over news that groups supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies had funded the FDA in an effort to influence the agency to impose harsh vaping restrictions.
The legislation prohibits the sale of vapor products to people below the age of 18 and bans e-cigarette sales within 100 meters from “any point of the perimeter of” a school, playground, or other facilities frequented by minors.
The bill also prohibits celebrities or social media influencers from endorsing vapor products.
Physical and online retailers or distributors must register with the Department of Trade and Industry and the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Senate President Pro Tempore Ralph Recto, the sponsor of the bill, said shifting to vaporized nicotine products “is a good public policy.”
“There will be less death and less expense on the part of society in treating patients. And that is the direction where many countries, more developed economies are moving toward,” Recto added.
The Philippines House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a similar bill in May. The two bills will now go to a conference committee where they will be reconciled, and both houses will vote on the final version. Then the unified bill will go to President Rodrigo Duterte to sign into law or veto.
Tobacco control groups are lobbying the president to veto the bill when it reaches his desk. A veto can be overridden with a two-thirds vote of both houses.
New Zealand’s new tobacco rules will likely have harsh consequences for indigenous Māori and other minority groups, according to Marewa Glover, founder and director of the Centre of Research Excellence: Indigenous Sovereignty & Smoking.
On Dec. 9, New Zealand announced a raft of new measures to help achieve its Smokefree 2025 goal. The legislation includes a plan to gradually raise the age at which people can purchase tobacco until it covers all age groups. Children now aged 13 and below face a lifetime ban on legally buying tobacco.
The new law will introduce a licensing system for tobacco retailers, reducing the number approved to 5-10 percent of the current estimated outlets. It bans filters and flavors, and seeks to cap cigarette nicotine to levels that are unsatisfying for smokers dependent on the substance.
Writing in Filter, Glover says Māori will be disproportionally affected because they have significantly higher rates of daily smoking (22.3 percent) than New Zealanders of European ancestry (8 percent).
“Illicit markets will scale up to fill the void where there should be a regulated market,” says Glover. “Competition over such markets can bring violence, and Māori, heavily overrepresented among lower-income groups with the highest smoking rates, will bear the brunt. The government response to illicit sales will mean criminalization and arrests, further swelling the grossly disproportionate numbers of Māori who are incarcerated.”
Meanwhile, New Zealand’s sizable Indian and Asian communities will be hurt economically by the new rules, as they own the majority of the small retail businesses that sell tobacco, according to Glover. “When raised tobacco taxes made cigarettes unaffordable for a large proportion of people who smoked, we saw a surge in aggravated robberies of such stores, in an illustration of ignored unintended consequences.”
Glover argues that, in pursuing smoke-free objectives, a legal reduced-risk product market is more effective than prohibition and punishment.
Taxpayers targeted by hikes in “sin taxes,” such as those imposed on cigarettes may be more likely to defraud other individuals in unrelated transactions, according to a recent study published by SSRN.
The researchers propose two reasons why affected taxpayers might commit more fraud following a sin tax hike. First, tax increases can reduce the buying power of targeted taxpayers. This reduction in purchasing power could increase the value of additional income to affected taxpayers and, accordingly, their incentive to commit fraud.
Second, being treated unfairly makes cheating behavior easier to rationalize, even when the potential victims of fraud are not responsible for the taxpayer’s unfair treatment. Surveys consistently report that affected taxpayers view sin tax hikes as unfair, which suggests that they may find it easier to rationalize defrauding others in the aftermath of sin tax hikes.
The researchers tested the relation between sin tax increases and fraud using data from New York City tax rides. They found that taxi drivers who both smoke and had low earnings in the recent past are even more likely to increase their level of fraud following the tax hike. Given the modest earnings of most taxi drivers, they likely notice their increased costs from a cigarette tax hike. The pain from the tax increase is probably felt even more keenly by taxi drivers with low earnings in the recent past. As a result, these drivers commit more fraud.
According to the researchers the findings suggest that some types of tax hikes can have negative fallout that stretches beyond the taxpayer in person.
Nicotine vaping among U.S. adolescents was down significant in 2021, according to the most recent Monitoring the Future survey of substance use behaviors and related attitudes among eighth, 10th, and 12th graders in the United States.
Among eighth graders, 12.1 percent reported vaping nicotine in the past year in 2021, compared to 16.6 percent in 2020. Among 10th graders, 19.5 percent reported vaping nicotine in the past year in 2021, compared to 30.7 percent in 2020. For 12th graders, the share reporting nicotine vaping in 2021 was 26.6 percent, compared to 34.5 percent in 2020.
Youth cigarette smoking fell to record lows this year, with past-month smoking rates of 4.1 percent for 12th graders, 1.8 percent for 10th graders and 1.1 percent for eighth graders.
Youth consumption of alcohol and illicit substances declined as well. “We have never seen such dramatic decreases in drug use among teens in just a one-year period. These data are unprecedented and highlight one unexpected potential consequence of the Covid-19 pandemic, which caused seismic shifts in the day-to-day lives of adolescents,” said Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse in a statement.
Despite the decrease in consumption, anti-vaping activists insisted that youth vaping remains a problem. “While this is a decline since youth e-cigarette rates peaked in 2019, it is nearly the same level as in 2018 (20.9 percent) when the U.S. Surgeon General, the FDA and other public health authorities declared youth e-cigarette use to be a public health epidemic,” said Matthew Myers, president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids in a statement.
The authors of the Monitoring the Future survey said this year’s results should be treated with caution due to the Covid-19 pandemic and remote learning. “Students who took the survey at home may not have had the same privacy or may not have felt as comfortable truthfully reporting substance use as they would at school, when they are away from their parents,” they noted.
Turning Point Brands (TPB) has appointed Yavor Efremov as president and CEO, effective Jan. 11,2022. Efremov succeeds the company’s current CEO, Larry Wexler, who will retire in January following 18 years at TPB. Wexler will remain on the board of directors and serve as a consultant to the company following his retirement.
Prior to joining TPB, Efremov served as the CEO of Motorsport Network, where he was responsible for upgrading the IT infrastructure, processes and company strategy to support the integration of more than 30 businesses around the world. He also served as a senior executive at Liberty Media Corp., where he was instrumental in sourcing, financing and growing Liberty’s investments in multibillion-dollar businesses, including Charter Communications and Formula 1.
“Yavor came highly recommended by some of the most successful operators and investors in the world,” said David Glazek, chairman of TPB in a statement. “The board is confident he has the right skill-set to help grow the company to the size and scale necessary to maximize value in a world driven by constantly shifting consumer preferences.”
“During my time as a board member, I have been impressed by the company’s prospects across all divisions,” said Efremov. “In my new role as CEO, I look forward to working alongside this dynamic team of industry leaders to tackle large, compelling opportunities in our existing business and adjacent categories as continued regulatory developments open new avenues for future growth.”
“It has been my sincere privilege to serve Turning Point Brands and its stakeholders during this period of significant growth as we increased EBITDA fivefold over the past 18 years,” said Wexler. “I want to thank both the board for the opportunity to serve our shareholders, and my colleagues for their dedication, hard work and, most importantly, their resiliency during my tenure.”
From left to right: Paul Moran, Nveed Chaudhary and Chris Allen
Contract Research Organization Broughton is restructuring its operations to prepare for growth.
Founder and CEO Paul Moran will transition to the role of executive chairman to further grow Broughton’s global capacity, focusing on expanding the company’s existing U.S. team. Co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer Chris Allen will become CEO on Jan. 1, 2022. Chief Regulatory Officer Nveed Chaudhary will take up the position of chief scientific and regulatory officer.
‘’Since 2006, our focus has always been to help our clients succeed,” said Moran. “With a passion for enhancing societal health and wellbeing, our expertise across harm reduction and next generation products now covers the broad life science industries of pharmaceuticals, nicotine containing products and cannabinoids. This next phase of our expansion is part of our natural evolution to grow capacity and capabilities. I’ll continue to focus my energies on new markets and early initiatives.”
“The recent changes to our management team reflect our continued commitment and ambition to become the most trusted integrated services provider in the world,” said Allen. “Our additional investment plans into global operations will enable us to expand our services for clients across the nicotine, pharmaceutical and cannabinoids markets, always with a focus to help clients deliver life-enhancing products to market.”
