From the Associate editor
Rupert Murdoch once said, “The world is changing very fast. Big will not beat small anymore. It will be the fast beating the slow.” How apt this is in describing how the tobacco industry has evolved, especially during the past few years. When you think about how traditional cigarettes changed since Philip Morris started selling hand-rolled Turkish cigarettes in 1847, the modern-day cigarette which comes in all sorts of sizes, filters, flavors, even nicotine levels, is quite something to behold. That progress took over 170 years to develop.
In the early 2000s, Chinese pharmacist and inventor, Hon Lik, gave the world its first commercially successful e-cigarette, which later led to the development of the vaporizers, pipes, e-hookahs, and e-cigars that we have now, including the liquids, flavors, and other accessories needed for these items. This process took less than two decades, a much shorter period than traditional cigarettes took.
While e-cigarettes quickly grew in popularity with consumers and governments and the anti-smoking bodies scrambled to define how exactly to regulate them, scientists and researchers quietly and quickly worked on another alternative to traditional cigarettes – heat-not-burn (HNB) products. With the successful introduction of iQOS in 2014 followed by iFuse, glo, and Ploom Tech, the time it took for HNB products to become popular is even less than e-cigarettes. This year one hall of the massive InterTabac exhibition will cater to HNB products.
Big industry players recognized the shift in the landscape from traditional tobacco products to new, alternative, smokeless ones and now give a larger focus to new products. PMI issued a “manifesto” earlier this year declaring they will be “building PMI’s future on smoke-free products that are a much better choice than cigarette smoking.” Privately one PMI source told Tobacco Asia that the internal timeframe to stop selling traditional cigarettes is 2025.
It appears that one of the main reasons for all these developments and changes over the years was a need to answer consumer desire and health concerns, and that these changes, which happened faster and faster, were made possible with the advance of technology and scientific knowledge available to the industry. The good news is, the advance of technology and scientific knowledge always moves forward, which means that there will be many, many new developments to look forward to, for both the industry and consumers. And, whoever introduces new changes faster will gain a distinct advantage.
So, on your mark. Get set. Go!