Abstract
Background: Philip Morris International (PMI) claims to be transforming and has committed to a 'smoke-free' future. In 2020, it announced an 'aspirational' target for reduced cigarette shipments by 2025. Methods: PMI cigarette shipment data are taken from PMI quarterly financial reports 2008-2023. Trends in these data before and after the 2020 announcement are analysed using linear regression, and auto regressive integrated moving average and error, trend, seasonal time-series models to assess if PMI's 2025 target would be met on pre-existing trends, and if the trend changed after the announcement. These trends are also compared with the global retail market for cigarettes, using sales data from Euromonitor. Results: Findings were consistent across all three models. PMI's shipment target of 550 billion cigarette sticks by 2025 would readily have been met given pre-existing shipment trends. Following the 2020 announcement, the decline in PMI cigarette shipments stalled markedly with a statistically significant change in trend (p<0.001). The current and projected trend to 2025 is consistent with no further decline in cigarette volumes, meaning PMI is unlikely to hit its target. This mirrors a global pattern in which declines in cigarette sales have stalled since 2020. Conclusions: PMI's 2025 target was not 'aspirational' but highly conservative - it would have been met based on pre-existing trends in declining cigarette shipments. Yet PMI will nonetheless fail to meet that target providing evidence it is not transforming. Stalling of the decline of PMI and global cigarette sales raises significant concerns about progress in global tobacco control.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | tc-2023-058511 |
| Journal | Tobacco Control |
| Early online date | 23 May 2024 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | E-pub ahead of print - 23 May 2024 |
Data Availability Statement
Data are available on reasonable request. Data may be obtained from a third party and are not publicly available. Data from commercial databases are used under licence and cannot be shared by the authors. All other data are available on reasonable request.This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited, appropriate credit is given, any changes made indicated, and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.
Funding
Bloomberg Philanthropies - Stop Tobacco Organizations and Products
Keywords
- Economics
- Global health
- Surveillance and monitoring
- Tobacco industry
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Health(social science)
- Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health
