Big tobacco: Smoking is still a truly enormous industry... and it's still growing?

Big tobacco: Smoking is still a truly enormous industry... and it's still growing?

6/8/21 8:00PM

Big Tobacco is still... big tobacco. This week British American Tobacco reported its latest financial results, painting a rosy picture for investors with a forecast to grow its revenue by 5% this year.

‍Wait... tobacco is still growing?

‍The cigarette industry may feel a bit like its been close to being extinguished ever since the health concerns about smoking became common knowledge in the 1960s — but somehow the industry has survived, and even thrived.

‍BAT, for example, reported sales of £25.8bn last year ($36bn). For context, that's more than Tesla ($31bn), adidas ($24bn) and Netflix ($25bn). The tobacco industry as a whole is expected to grow to more than $260bn a year by 2027, according to some estimates.

Although big tobacco giants remain predominantly reliant on good old fashioned cigarette sticks, they all have various bets on potential new technologies that are healthier or less toxic than traditional ciggies. BAT itself now boasts more than 13 million consumers for its "non-combustible" products, which includes vaping. The company is hoping to hit 50 million by the end of the decade. Big tobacco is not dead, far from it in fact.

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The most watched soccer match in US history got less than a third of the views the Super Bowl did

Between a top-spot finish in the group stage, a sweeping performance against Bosnia and Herzegovina in the round of 32, and the president’s controversial intervention, Monday evening’s USMNT game against Belgium had, to put it lightly, shaped up into a box-office clash.

And though the US players’ performance on the pitch might not have lived up to the high drama off it, American soccer fans certainly showed up. According to early estimates, the 4-1 defeat against Belgium was the most watched soccer telecast in US history, hauling some 40 million viewers on average across the coverage on Fox and Telemundo.

That may be a record tally in the US for the sport that much of the world calls some variant of “football” — besting the 36.2 million who tuned in to watch the team’s previous knock-out match — but it’s still peanuts in comparison to the sport that shares the same name in the States.

World cup viewers chart — Sherwood News

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45% of Americans say they’re not taking a summer vacation this year, mostly due to costs

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