British American Tobacco

Our Chief Marketing Officer, Kingsley Wheaton, appeared on Sky News this morning following his keynote speech at the first ever virtual Global Tobacco and Nicotine Forum (GTNF).

Speaking on the Ian King Live show, Kingsley stressed the need for a collaborative, stakeholder-inclusive approach to accelerate tobacco harm reduction - the main focus of his GTNF speech.

Kingsley said: “I’ve been talking this morning about how we need to bring all parties to this complex societal debate to ensure we can accelerate tobacco harm reduction as fast as possible.

“We have to communicate and engage with regulators, policy makers, society and consumers with factual information to make sure we have a fact-based discourse to understand how we can accelerate tobacco harm reduction.”

Talking about BAT’s A Better Tomorrow journey, he added: “We’ve been making great progress. We came out with an ambition in March to have 50 million non-combustible consumers by 2030. We already have 12 million users of our non-combustible products – a number that has increased by 3 million in the last 12 months.”

Kingsley went on to highlight individual New Category product successes in Canada, the UK, Japan and the USA before the conversation turned to our tobacco plant-based vaccine development work.

Kingsley explained how our flu vaccine was at the phase 1 clinical trial stage, while our COVID vaccine has been submitted to the US Food and Drug Administration for review before it can progress to clinical trials.

“These are exciting times”, Kingsley said. “We must move carefully and thoughtfully forward with our vaccine development, but tobacco plant-based vaccines can offer the world some exciting opportunities.

“This is all part of our A Better Tomorrow journey as we gradually shift our revenues away from combustibles to new alternatives.”

• Read a full transcript of Kingsley’s GTNF keynote speech here.