Gaining access to Vietnam’s cigarette market: British American Tobacco’s strategy to enter ‘a huge market which will become enormous’

Cigarette smuggling takes place on a colossal scale. Each year approximately 400 billion cigarettes, or one-third of all legally exported cigarettes, end up illegally smuggled across international borders. Cigarettes are the world’s most widely smuggled legal consumer product. Based on company documents that use these terms, this report looks at the smuggling of cigarettes manufactured by British American Tobacco, Philip Morris, and R.J. Reynolds Tobacco in four representative countries —Bangladesh, Cameroon, Colombia and Spain—to illustrate, in considerable detail, the major cigarette companies’ various roles in international smuggling operations. As these examples show, the major companies have gone well beyond knowingly selling cigarettes that they know will end up in the hands of smugglers but have also carefully monitored and overseen the smuggling of their brands into various countries, often treating the illegal importation and contraband sales of their cigarettes as …