Philip Morris to stop selling Marlboro cigarettes in UK within 10 years

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Iconic Marlboro cigarette brand will disappear from UK shelves within 10 years, said tobacco group chief executive Philip Morris International.

Jacek Olczak, who has engaged Philip Morris in a more radical diversification strategy than most of his global peers, said the “smoking problem” could be solved in the UK within “10 years at most”.

He told the Mail on Sunday that would mean “absolutely” to stop selling traditional cigarettes in the UK. The Marlboro brand, once marketed as a women’s cigarette but made famous by ‘Marlboro Man’ advertising campaigns featuring hardy outdoor types, ‘will disappear’.

Philip Morris International, which split from New York-listed tobacco company Altria in 2008, sells Marlboro throughout much of the world. Its income in the UK is around £ 800million a year, according to documents from Companies House. Its former parent company still manufactures and sells the cigarettes in the United States, where it is clearly the market leader.

Under Olczak, who became Managing Director earlier this year after nearly 30 years with the company, Philip Morris has invested heavily in alternatives to nicotine, including its flagship product IQOS. The cigarette-like device, which heats tobacco instead of burning it, has more than 20 million users worldwide.

Globally, the company derives almost a quarter of its revenue from alternative products, a far greater proportion than competitors such as Altria and Imperial Tobacco.

In March, Philip Morris pledged to get half of its revenue from non-smoking products and earlier this month the company announced it would acquire Vectura, a UK maker of inhalers for the administration. in drugs, worth more than £ 1 billion.

CFO Emmanuel Babeau told the Financial Times last week: “We believe and we will help phase out cigarettes. “

Anti-smoking activists have expressed skepticism that tobacco companies can abandon traditional cigarettes altogether and claim that some of the alternatives to smoking are almost as harmful.

The commitment to phase out traditional cigarettes in the UK is also driven in part by consumer and investor behavior, as well as government policy. Smoking rates in the country are already relatively low while cigarettes are heavily taxed and, since 2016, are sold in plain packaging.

In 2019, the government pledged to reduce the prevalence of smoking to 5% by 2030, about a third of current levels.