Mr. Davis: It's fair to say we are one of the world's integrated tobacco companies; what I mean by that is that we are not just a cigarette company, we also manufacture other tobacco products like roll-your-own and pipe tobacco, cigars and cigarette paper. We have a long and illustrious history, we're one of the oldest tobacco companies in the world, and parts of our business date back to the 1700s, but the more modern Imperial Tobacco was formed in 1901 to fend off American competition. For most of the 20th Century our tobacco business was largely in the UK, and it was only in the very latter part - the 1990s - that we started to develop as an international tobacco business; and that was achieved by international organic growth and acquisitions which were largely internationally skewed. The effect has been to significantly raise the proportion of our profit that comes from international activities. If I go back to the late 1980s/early 1990s about 5% of profit came from international activities, and at our latest full year results, over 40% was from international activity, and our aim is to keep that growing.
TWST: A recap briefly of the descriptive statistics of the tobacco
markets: can you give me an idea of the size and the growth rates?
Mr. Davis: If you look at the world market in total, you're looking at a
massive total, over five trillion sticks, but obviously a huge
proportion of that is in China, which is covered by the Chinese
monopoly. In general terms, I would have to describe the world market as
static, with mature Western markets either static or in decline and some
of the emerging markets in growth, but overall it's fairly static.
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