The market-share gap between the top-selling U.S. electronic cigarettes has shrunk over the past month with Juul holding about a 4.2-percentage point gap over R.J. Reynolds Vapor Co.’s Vuse.
The latest Nielsen analysis of convenience store data, covering the four-week period ending Feb. 12, determined Juul was at 37.9percent market share and Vuse at 33.7 percent, according to Winston-Salem Journal.
There has been a 4- to 4.8-percentage point gap between the two e-cigarettes for the last six Nielsen reports.
NJoy was at 3.2 percent, up from 3.1 percent in the previous report, while Fontem Ventures’ blu eCigs rose from 2.3 percent to 2.4 percent.
E-cigarette sales overall have slumped since February 2020, when the Food and Drug Administration implemented its latest round of heightened regulations on the products.
Those restrictions foremost required manufacturers of cartridge-based e-cigarettes, such as Juul Labs Inc., Reynolds Vapor, NJoy and Fontem, to stop making, distributing and selling “unauthorized flavorings” in February 2021, or risk enforcement actions.
Goldman Sachs analyst Bonnie Herzog said another factor in the slump is “the impact of e-cigarette market denial orders by the FDA as it continues to work through premarket tobacco applications.”