Euromonitor's Skewed Data
Kenya
Tobacco in Kenya:
The tactic used by BAT and other industries is to smuggle goods into countries such as Kenya and then bring it to the attention of the governments how much profit they are losing. Due to this, the government then works with the tobacco company to set up in that country, which benefits both entities but especially the industry. BAT addresses this on their website, stating illicit cigarette sales account for 12% of their market but Kenya loses KSh2.2 billion in revenue. |
Report on Kenya Tobacco:
Within Euromonitor's report on both tobacco in Kenya and cigarettes in Kenya, the illicit trade is mentioned briefly at the beginning of the report and never after. It claims "illegal importers" target low income groups who desire economy brands, but does not state how the importers gain their product. In addition, the report states nothing of BAT's involvement with the illicit trade even though Euromonitor's project contract with PMI IMPACT is to investigate into these countries. EM has a history of manipulating data on illicit trade in the past, seen in the image below. Now that they are funded by the tobacco industry, is it a surprise to see they have no data on illicit trade? |
Data from Report on Illicit Trade in South Africa
This diagram depicts the illicit trade as a percentage of the market in South Africa, with each year representing a different report. As you can see, the data radically changes report to report. For example, the estimate in 2002 for the 2002 report was ~27%, and in 2005 the estimate for 2002 was ~2.5% of the total market.
Philip Morris Report
PMI inc.:
As stated before, PMI inc. now funds Euromonitor through subsidiary companies FSFW and PMI IMPACT. It is speculated that this will affect their data on the tobacco industry, and as seen above, this speculation is sound. The funding affects the country reports on tobacco, but how is it reflected in the company report? |
Company Report: PMI inc.:
In the very beginning of each company report, Euromonitor International writes a disclaimer addressing any inaccuracies their data might contain. In the report on PMI inc., they state differences may arise in their use of "retail sales" for data in contrary to PMI inc.'s use of "shipment volumes." The report then uses data solely based on shipment volumes 10 times throughout. In addition to this, the report focuses heavily on PMI inc.'s efforts to switch to heated tobacco, but fails to mention the non existent health benefit. |