It just keeps growing. In the latest Nielsen analysis of convenience-store data, the market-share gap between Vuse and Juul vaping products has stretched to a double-digit lead for Vuse.
The analysis, released Tuesday, covers the four-week period ending Sept. 10.
Vuse’s market share rose from 39 percent in the previous report to 39.7 percent, compared with Juul declining from 29.4 percent to 28.1 percent.
Vuse also has also now edged ahead of Juul in the year-over-year comparison at 32.9 percent to 32.7 percent, respectively. It’s the first time Vuse has led the year-over-year comparison.
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, according to the Winston-Salem Journal.
The looming potential for an outright ban of Juul Labs’ e-cigarettes from U.S. retail shelves has accelerated the market-share gains of R.J. Reynolds Vapor Co.’s Vuse brand, according to reports.
Meanwhile, No. 3 NJoy dropped from 2.9 percent to 2.8 percent, while Fontem Ventures’ blu eCigs slipped from 1.6 percent to 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 17.7 percent decline in the latest report.
By comparison, Reynolds’ Vuse was up 41.4 percent in the latest report, while NJoy was down 5.6 percent and blu eCigs fell to 30.2 percent.
BAT is accelerating the pace of price hikes for its e-cigarette brands and traditional tobacco products even as inflation continues to clamp down on consumers’ discretionary spending.
Goldman Sachs analyst Bonnie Herzog released Monday a detailed analysis to investors of the R.J. Reynolds Vapor Co.’s top-selling U.S. e-cigarette Vuse.
Another round of price increases also is set for R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. products; list-price hikes went into effect Monday.
Herzog’s reports are based on “industry trade contacts” and are rarely wrong.
The list price is what wholesalers pay manufacturers for their traditional cigarette products. The increase typically is passed on to customers at retail, according to the Winston-Salem Journal.
“While there is some increased risk of potential downtrading and concerns that manufacturers have less pricing power today, we believe brands … with a very loyal customer base and strong/effective promotions should be able to keep those consumers within the franchise,” Herzog said.
Reynolds also is raising by 17 cents per pack the price of its heat-not-burn traditional cigarette Eclipse, which is sold in limited stock.
Even in the slow summer months in a college town, Aj’s Liquor in Ames, Iowa, sells roughly 160 Juul pods a week to customers between the ages of 21 to 24.
Will Montgomery, sales representative for Aj’s Liquor, said customers are already transitioning to alternative brands for nicotine products as the FDA considers a marketing denial order against Juul. Even if the ban is successful, Montgomery said he doesn’t expect electronic nicotine delivery systems to decrease in sales.
“People are still going to need nicotine,” Montgomery said.
Taylor Boland, director of communications for Kum & Go, said all Kum & Go stores ceased sales of all Juul products on June 23 but resumed sales following the federal court’s block.
“Kum & Go remains committed to selling age-restricted products responsibly and complying with local, state and federal laws, orders, and mandates,” Boland said in an email response to Iowa Capital Dispatch.
Montgomery said the majority of customers who buy Juuls aren’t using them to stop smoking. If they were, they’d buy lower-nicotine products, he said.
Payton Hartz started vaping because of how convenient the products were. After Juul limited their flavors, Hartz transitioned to an alternative disposable vape brand.
The potential ban has “opened the door for other companies to push to the front,” Hartz said. “I feel like the throw-away vapes hadn’t existed until the Juul really came around. I feel like with the laws, all it has really done is push more companies to be even with Juul.”
The R.J. Reynolds Vapor Co. and its Vuse brand e-cigarette continues to gradually grow its U.S. market-share lead over Juul.
Vuse’s market share rose from 35.1 percent to 35.5 percent, compared with Juul declining from 33.1 percent to 32.9 percent, according to the latest Nielsen analysis of convenience-store data that covers the four-week period ending June 18.
“Having received the emergency temporary stay, we are now seeking the ability to continuously offer our products to adult smokers throughout our appeal with the court and science- and evidence-based engagement with our regulator,” Joe Murillo, Juul Labs’ chief regulatory officer, said Tuesday. “We remain confident in our science and evidence and believe that we will be able to demonstrate that our products do in fact meet the statutory standard of being ‘appropriate for the protection of the public health.’ “
Nielsen largely covers larger chain stores and doesn’t track local vape shop sales. For the smaller chains, the group extrapolates trends, which is why trend changes don’t appear immediately in Nielsen, such as the rise of disposable products.
Nielsen determined that Vuse recaptured the top market share in the April 23 report. That was the first time Vuse held the top market share in the Nielsen report since November 2017.
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 12.2 percent decline in the latest report.
By comparison, Reynolds’ Vuse was up 40.5 percent in the latest report, while NJoy was down 14.1 percent and blu eCigs down 27.9 percent. Goldman Sachs analyst Bonnie Herzog has said that NJoy “refutes Nielsen’s data and methodology.”
Another factor is that e-cigarette sales overall have slumped since February 2020, when the FDA implemented its latest round of heightened regulations on the products.
Romania is more progressive when it comes to vaping than many of its neighbors.
By Norm Bour
Romania, a country of just under 20 million people, is considered progressive when it comes to vaping. As a member of the European Union, it follows the Tobacco Products Directive, which has been in force for almost a decade now.
Romanian law prohibits the use of e-cigarettes on public transport and e-cigarette sponsorship and restricts much of the advertising of vaping products. A text-only health warning is required to cover 30 percent of the product package, according to tobaccocontrollaws.org.
The country has a high percentage of smokers, estimated to be about one-quarter of the population, which is dropping. Whether those former smokers have quit nicotine entirely or moved to vaping is hard to determine. As in many places, vaping is embraced primarily by the mid-20s to mid-30s age groups, with about 3 percent of the population being vapers.
Remarkably, at a time when the popularity of vaping is increasing throughout Europe, only 1.5 percent of Romanians under the age of 24 vape. Overall, it appears that about 2 percent of the Romanian population has taken up the habit. This creates many new opportunities for budding entrepreneurs.
With a growing number of shops in the capital city of Bucharest, I visited two of them to get a better feel for their perspectives. I also wanted to know if the shops were getting business from Turkey, just a few hundred miles away, where vape shops are illegal.
Florin Mincu is an early innovator in the vapor business. He opened Vaper’s Paradise in 2010.
“My taxi driver from the airport was smoking, and I saw him put what I thought was a lit cigarette in his shirt pocket. “‘Whoa,’ I said, ‘what did you just do?’ He explained that it was an e-cigarette, and he bought it from a black market guy selling them out of his trunk,” said Mincu. “I knew this was important, so within two hours, I had the taxi driver take me to meet this person. Remember, these were the days before true vape shops. I used the products he was selling and quit smoking in two months, and that is when I opened my first shop.”
When I hear stories like this, I wonder if I would have been so impulsive, but Mincu did not hesitate. Now, a dozen years later, he has two shops. In his main shop, with only 20 square meters (215 square feet) of space, he earns upward of $50,000 in revenue. In the Romanian context, this is a hugely successful shop.
We spoke about the government’s attitude and support of vaping, and he said they are “about 50 percent in,” which means they don’t support it, but they don’t outlaw it either. Fortunately, the country is pro-tobacco, so when he opened his shop, authorities assumed it was just another tobacco business.
After talking with Mincu, I spoke with another shop owner who requested anonymity, but both shops said the average age of their customers is about 30. As in many countries, no one under 18 is permitted inside the vape shop.
Vaper’s Paradise carries single-use and disposable kits, but the store is still pretty “old school,” with big mods and the heavy vapor products featuring prominently in its collection. Because of that, Vaper’s Paradise carries an impressive assortment of liquids, including American-made Five Pawns and Got Vape. Mincu prefers the U.K. brands, especially Nasty Juice, since it offers better pricing, great flavors and enjoys great popularity among his customers.
He also favors Nasty Juice because it burns cleanly and the cotton lasts much longer, and he’s a fan of U.K.-made Kilo but says this product is tougher to get now.
“About half our customers are getting into the disposables, but I have a large YouTube following, and they know I have a sophisticated taste for liquids, so they follow my advice,” he claimed. “Quality and flavors are what keep our customers happy, but even more important, any RDA [rebuildable dripping atomizer] hardware must be easy to use.”
Mincu does a lot of RDA builds and is always trying to improve the quality of the products. By trial and error, he developed his own technique, which he teaches to others. The coil has a very specific sound—and quality—when he gets it right.
They call it “polita,” which may not be a real word, but the sound it makes is very real.
He also said that many reviewers go into too much detail when evaluating hardware. “It’s not required to spend an hour on an atomizer,” he griped. “They are not that complicated! I try to keep my reviews short and tight and keep reader’s already short attention spans.”
Both shop owners agree that the Romanian vapor market is driven by flavors—a universal reality that makes the Food and Drug Administration policy so restrictive for their colleagues in the United States. When asked about the future potential for vaping in Romania, both entrepreneurs I spoke with were bullish and said they planned to open new shops in 2023.
Mincu has a big vision and is planning a shop about five times larger than his current outfit. He also has a robust online presence, and when asked about that bleed-over business from Turkey, where there are no legal shops, he said, “Absolutely. You cannot keep products out of people’s hands today. If someone wants something, they will find a way to get it, and we should know by now that telling someone that a product is illegal will only make them want it more.”
Mincu gets a lot of airline employees and pilots from different countries that are more restrictive about vaping products. And although Romania has vaping industry trade groups, Mincu has not joined any of them because “they don’t want to change, and they avoid new technology”—a common complaint shared by vapor industry representatives in many countries.
Mincu and I finished up our conversation by speaking about hemp, CBD and cannabis. Hemp and CBD still operate in a regulatory gray area in Romania, and even though Mincu has received offers to sell those products, he does not. It’s not worth the risk, he says, since CBD cannot contain THC, which remains illegal in Romania. However, Mincu expects this to change in the next few years.
Norm Bour is the founder of VapeMentors and works with vape businesses worldwide. He can be reached at norm@VapeMentors.com.
Jamaica has seen a rise in e-cigarette sales. In a recent interview with the owner of local vape shops, a story in the Jamaica Observer states that increasing number of Jamaicans are turning to vape retail outlets across the island to curtail their smoking habit.
Ravn Rae, the owner the Mez Vape & Smoke Shop, which has been in operation since 2013, says they have received countless testimonials from its local and international customers, who have used Rae’s vaping products to help them successfully quit tobacco smoking.
The shop has locations in Kingston and Montego Bay and Rae told the newspaper that she prides herself on only selling “authentic, certified, quality-assured and proven products to buyers” that are over 18 years of age.
“I have even been visited by parents on numerous occasions seeking safer vape products to help their adult children quit smoking,” she attests. “The good thing about vape products is that they have been proven to be much safer alternatives to combustible cigarettes and the level of nicotine in vape products can be determined by the buyer.”
Flavors other than tobacco are also popular with adult Jamaican consumers, according to Rae. She revealed that some flavor profiles are also more effective than others “as these are not the generic flavors that smokers typically associate with traditional tobacco cigarettes.”
The Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) first-ever report on e-cigarette products reveals surging e-cigarette sales and advertising.
The report, which is based on industry data provided for the years 2015 to 2018, shows that total e-cigarette sales, including both disposable units and those using changeable cartridges, increased more than sixfold from $304.2 million to $2.06 billion in those three years alone. The sales of fruit and other flavored e-cigarette cartridges preferred by youth increased sevenfold over that time, and nicotine concentrations in disposable e-cigarette products also increased.
“The commission’s inaugural e-cigarette report paints a disturbing picture, especially with e-cigarettes driving an unprecedented increase in youth use of tobacco products,” said Samuel Levine, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, in a statement. “The data show that this increase coincided with dramatic spikes in the market share of flavored products, higher concentrations of nicotine and an industry attempt to evade a ban on free sampling.”
The Association of Convenience Stores (ACS), a U.K.-based retailers group with more than 33,500 members, has launched a new guide to help retailers with the sale and supply of e-cigarettes and other vaping products.
The guide, which is part of a wider group of Assured Advice guides, covers the regulations that govern the sale and supply of e-cigarettes, retailers’ responsibilities when selling these products, how to ensure packaging and labelling are compliant with the regulations, and advice on how to make sure underage sales do not take place.
Within the guide, ACS recommends retailers use the Challenge25 policy when selling e-cigarettes and vaping products. Challenge 25 is a retailing strategy that encourages anyone who is over 18 but looks under 25 to carry acceptable ID.
As part of an update to Challenge25 materials launched in January, there are new posters, badges and other downloadable materials which refer specifically to e-cigarettes. The new guide is available to download from the ACS website. The Assured Advice guides have the backing of Surrey and Buckinghamshire trading standards departments.
Sales of cigarettes in South Korea were flat from 2020 to 2021 but demand for electronic cigarettes rose amid the protracted pandemic, reports the Yonhap News Agency, citing data from the finance ministry.
South Korean smokers purchased 3.59 billion 20-cigarette packs in 2021, similar to the number logged the previous year, according to the Ministry of Economy and Finance.
Sales of traditional cigarettes fell 2 percent on-year to 3.15 billion packs last year, while those of heat-not-burn tobacco products rose 17.1 percent to 440 million packs.
Compared with 2014, however, cigarette sales declined 17.7 percent last year—a development the government attributed to rising prices and anti-smoking campaigns.
In January 2015, South Korea increased cigarette prices by 80 percent to KRW4,500 ($3.72). The next year, the government required tobacco companies to print graphic images depicting the harmful effects of smoking on the upper part of cigarette packs.
As of 2020, the smoking rate among Korean men aged 19 or older dropped to a record low of 34 percent, down 1.7 percentage points from a year earlier, according to the health ministry.
Australian retail representative groups say an overhaul of vaping rules and regulations, alongside a crackdown on the supply of such products to minors, is necessary. The Australian Association of Convenience Stores (AACS), the Master Grocers Association (MGA), and the Australian Lottery and Newsagents Association (ALNA), released a joint statement criticizing the Commonwealth Government’s policy on vapes, claiming it is misguided, poorly designed, and failing the community.
Theo Foukkare, CEO AACS, said although the representative groups disagree with the current prescription model, they do not condone outlets disregarding the law and selling nicotine vaping products to anyone, especially children, according to a story in Convenience and Impulse Retailing.
“We are urging the federal government to consider an overhaul of vaping regulations as a matter of urgency, bringing us into line with the UK and New Zealand where adults – and only adults – can access vapes to help them quit smoking. But in the meantime, urgent enforcement action is needed against those supplying vapes to children,” he said.
The call for a crackdown on the supply of vapes to children comes following widespread reports of use of vapes in Queensland schools. “We would welcome a crackdown on those that are supplying vaping products to children, whether that’s online platforms like Facebook Marketplace or rogue bricks and mortar traders.
“It is clear that not enough is being done to prevent unscrupulous store owners and dodgy online retailers from selling all kinds of vaping products containing mysterious cocktails of ingredients to teens,” he said. The associations also noted an influx of ‘pop-up shops’ selling illicit tobacco products across south east Queensland over the last 18 months, with the majority also selling nicotine vapes. “These are clearly irresponsible retailers who should not be permitted to sell any tobacco of vaping products.”
A proposed solution could be the introduction of a low-cost licensing scheme in Queensland allowing only responsible retailers to deal in tobacco products and would provide a mechanism to shut down and punish those operating outside the law.
The Association of Convenience Stores (ACS), a U.K.-based retailers group with more than 33,500 members, has launched a new guide to help retailers with the sale and supply of e-cigarettes and other vaping products.
