Reducing the health impact of our business

Smokeless alternatives to cigarettes, such as Vapour , Heated Tobacco and Modern Oral products, already have an estimated 68 million consumers worldwide.

They provide options for the estimated 19% of the world’s population who continue to smoke to switch away from cigarettes.

To succeed in this, the following key enablers need to be in place: consumer choice ; world-class science ; standards and regulation.

Consumer choice

We have a clear purpose to build A Better Tomorrow™ by reducing the health impact of our business.

This entails:

•  Committing to providing adult consumers with a wide range of enjoyable and less risky products
•  Continuing to be clear that combustible cigarettes pose serious health risks, and the only way to avoid these risks is not to start or to quit
•  Encouraging those who otherwise continue to smoke, to switch completely to scientifically-substantiated, reduced-risk alternatives *†
•  Tracking and sharing progress of our transformation.
   

As such, alongside our traditional cigarette products, our broad portfolio of Smokeless Products includes reduced-risk*† alternatives such as vapour products, tobacco heating products, and modern oral nicotine pouches, as well as traditional oral products such as snus and moist snuff.

Our ambition is to have 50 million consumers of our Smokeless Products by 2030 and to accelerate the growth of our Smokeless Products, reaching at least 50% of our revenues by 2035. 

To achieve this, we are developing a deep understanding of our consumers and anticipate trends with powerful foresights, data and analytics. We make significant investments in research and development to deliver innovations that satisfy consumer tastes and generate growth for the business. And we’re opening up to radical new ideas and seeking out the inventiveness of others through strategic investments and partnerships.

Since launching our first vapour products in the UK in 2013, we have made significant progress in developing, manufacturing and commercialising a range of new category products. As of 30 June 2024, there are 26.4m consumers of our Smokeless Products and revenue from Smokeless Products accounts for 17.9% of Group revenue.

To help us achieve our goals, we are also simplifying our range into three strong, trusted international brands that can compete on the global stage: Vuse in Vapour, glo in Heated Tobacco and Velo in Modern Oral.

As well as giving us a clear focus for our growing marketing investments, this change will make it easier for consumers to recognise and navigate our product portfolio. Although this shift has been slowed from the timing we originally announced in early 2020 due to the disruption caused by COVID-19, we are already accelerating our New Categories brand awareness through a truly global partnership with McLaren.

Read more here .

•  Comprehensive details of how we’re enabling consumer choice through our range of new category products can be found in our BAT Combined Annual and Sustainability Report 2023 (8.0 mb) .
   

World-class science

We apply our peer-reviewed scientific framework to assess the emissions, exposure and risk of our products. Product safety standards go hand-in-hand with sound science – we scrutinise all the ingredients and our products benefit from thousands of hours of testing before they reach the consumer.

We openly share our science, publish our findings in peer-reviewed journals, present at conferences and to government advisory committees. We also publish comprehensive details of our research programme on our dedicated bat-science.com website.

Our latest clinical trial for our tobacco heating product, glo, is the first ever to show that switching to exclusive use of glo instead of continued smoking is comparable to smoking cessation. We know scientific substantiation is essential for our New Category products to make tobacco harm reduction a reality. And we are proud to be leading the way with our world-class science.

To date, we have published over 150 peer-reviewed papers on our new category products. The results indicate that our products have the potential to be significantly less risky than cigarettes and we’re continuing to establish more evidence to support this.

•  Full details of our scientific framework and findings of our research, as well as the growing independent evidence-base, can be found in our BAT Combined Annual and Sustainability Report 2023 (8.0 mb).
   

Standards and regulation

We follow strict standards for product safety and for ensuring all our product marketing worldwide is aimed only at adult consumers and does not engage or appeal to youth. We openly share our approach and advocate for industry-wide standards and regulation.

We think regulation of new category products should enable market availability, apply the highest quality and safety standards, allow communication of the potential benefits and risks, and ensure affordability for consumers by taxing them appropriately – all the while preventing youth appeal and access.

We’ve evolved our International Marketing Principles and Underage Access Prevention Guidelines to reflect our multi-category portfolio. We’ve openly shared our approach to product stewardship and have worked as part of multi-stakeholder groups on the development of industry-wide standards, including with the British Standards Institute , the EU Standards body (CEN) technical committee and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).

•  Find out more about our regulatory engagement and views on an effective regulatory framework for new category products that is based on relative risks in our BAT Combined Annual and Sustainability Report 2023 (8.0 mb).