“I hate cigarettes,” Jennifer Motles, the chief sustainability officer at the world’s largest tobacco company, Philip Morris International, told me over the phone this week. But that admission is remarkably on brand for PMI, a company that, since 2016, says it is committed to a future without smoking.
By 2025, PMI wants to be a majority “smoke-free” business, replacing cigarettes with IQOS, the company’s line of vape products. Sales of PMI’s “heated tobacco” products made up 29% of company revenues in 2021; 72% of those customers were, according to PMI’s latest annual report, cigarette quitters.
