A slight dip in the market-share lead of R.J. Reynolds Vapor Co.’s Vuse vaping system was announced in the latest Nielsen convenience store report released last week.
Vuse’s market share declined from 42.2 percent to 41.8 percent, compared with Juul declining from 26.1 percent to 26 percent.
The latest Nielsen analysis covers the four-week period ending April 22.
According to Barclays, Nielsen largely covers the big chains. For the smaller chains, the group extrapolates trends, which is why trend changes don’t appear immediately in Nielsen. Local vape shops are not included in the data.
Consumer demand for tobacco products has ebbed and flowed over the past 12 months, mostly from the impact of inflation and recent upticks in traditional cigarette prices, according to media reports.
No. 3 NJoy was unchanged at 2.7 percent, while Fontem Ventures’ blu eCigs was unchanged at 1.4 percent.
Juul’s four-week dollar sales in the latest report have dropped from a 50.2 percent increase in the Aug. 10, 2019, report to a 22.6 percent decline in the latest report.
By comparison, Reynolds’ Vuse was up 23.1 percent in the latest report, while NJoy was down 8.1 percent, blu eCigs down 35.1 percent and Japan Tobacco’s Logic up 4.9 percent.
As recently as May 2019, Juul held a 74.6 percent U.S. e-cig market share.
In March of this year, Altria Group announced it had entered into an agreement to acquire Njoy Holdings for approximately $2.75 billion in cash. Altria said it had multiple sources of funding for the deal, including cash from a $2.7 billion agreement with Philip Morris International last year for IQOS.
A day before the Njoy announcement, Altria Group announced it had exchanged its entire investment in Juul Labs for a non-exclusive, irrevocable global license to certain of Juul’s heated tobacco intellectual property.
