We understand that tobacco is a controversial industry. Building trust is crucial, which is why we have adopted an open and responsible approach everywhere we operate, working with transparency and clarity and ensuring that our actions speak louder than our words.
We're responsible
As an international business, with brands sold in more than 200 markets worldwide, we can help to raise standards at a global scale.
Conducting our business with honesty, integrity and transparency is not only the right thing to do, but is also critical to the continuing development of a business that is responsible, successful and sustainable in the long term. Our corporate behaviour is monitored at all levels, right up to the Board CSR Committee.
In 2014, we revised, updated and republished our Standards of Business Conduct to reflect a new policy area of workplace and human rights, covering many of the themes in our Employment Principles. The standards are an integral part of the Group’s governance and help underpin our commitment to corporate responsibility. They apply to all Group companies and employees and require high standards of behaviour and integrity wherever our businesses operate.
We have achieved inclusion in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index (DJSI) for the last 13 years, 12 of them as industry leader. In 2014 we achieved our highest ever score. Our overall score was 89% (+2% from 87% in 2013). We achieved best scores for the industry in 13 of the 20 categories, including a maximum 100% rating in five key categories – Risk and Crisis Management, Customer Relationship Management, Combatting Smuggling, Environmental Policy/Management System, and Responsible Marketing Policies.
Fighting tobacco trafficking
The global black market in tobacco products is huge, and accounts for up to 600 billion cigarettes every year, robbing governments of around £30 billion in legitimate taxes. This illegal trade is also a huge competitor for the tobacco industry itself, and takes away a significant amount of legitimate business each year.
That’s why we invest more than £50 million each year in the fight against this illegal trade.
The tobacco industry has worked together on initiatives across the whole supply chain that are designed to stop criminals. These include technological developments such as digital coding and tax verification, which help governments ensure taxes and duty are paid, and a track and trace system, which means we can monitor our products as they move through the supply chain. If products are found on the black market, the system can trace them back to their point of departure from the legitimate supply chain.
Some of the most important policies guiding what we do are our International Marketing Principles. They’re a set of standards that reflect current thinking in terms of marketing, technology, regulation and stakeholder expectations. They require that:
Four standards
- Our marketing will not mislead about the risks of smoking;
- We will only market our products to adult smokers;
- We will not seek to influence the consumer’s decision about whether or not to smoke, nor how much to smoke; and
- It will always be clear to our consumers that our advertising originates from a tobacco company and that it is intended to promote the sale of our tobacco brands.
Nicotine products: E-cigarettes
With all our e-cigarettes, we have voluntarily adopted appropriate warnings on all our packaging and a robust approach to manufacturing quality and product assessment, including for all ingredients and flavours.
All our e-cigarette marketing communications are required to:
- Only be directed at adults aged 18 or over, in terms of both the content and type of media in which they appear;
- Only be directed at existing smokers or existing consumers of other nicotine products; and
- Not be aimed at promoting the use of tobacco products.
We plan to publish our new marketing principles for nicotine products by the end of the year.
