MARCELO NICO, MANAGING DIRECTOR OF PHILIP MORRIS SA

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Philip Morris International has recently published its fourth Sustainability Report and core to this is the company’s mission to unsmoke the world through sustainability and its business strategies. The report outlines how PMI is accelerating efforts to accomplish its mission to unsmoke the world, including its progress against a set of key business transformation metrics.
The report documents how PMI is continuing to focus considerable resources to prevent child labor and improve labor conditions throughout its value chain; scaling up its efforts toward improving inclusion and diversity; and reducing its environmental footprint through greener energy, water and litter management and the preservation of biodiversity, land and forests.

The following were among PMI’s key milestones in 2018 on the road to a sustainable, smoke-free future:
•Only four years after it was launched, PMI estimates that 6.6 million adult smokers have stopped smoking and switched to the company’s heated tobacco product IQOS.
•Smoke-free products represented 5.1 percent of shipment volume, but already 13.8 percent of net revenues. IQOS was available in 44 markets by the end of 2018. In 19 of these markets, net revenues from smoke-free products for PMI exceeded 10 percent of total net revenues, and in three markets, smoke-free products already became the biggest part of PMI’s business, exceeding 50 percent of total net revenues.
•PMI continued to shift its resources toward smoke-free products: 92 percent of its research and development investment and 60 percent of its global commercial expenditure were dedicated to smoke-free products, while seven manufacturing facilities were producing them, up from three factories in 2017.
•Playing its part in the circular economy, PMI established a centralized initiative to recycle used IQOS devices; CIRCLE (Central Inspection and Recycling for Closed Loop Economy) brings returned device recycling to the highest industry standards.
12 Jun 2019 9AM English South Africa Business News · Investing

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