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Philip Morris International sells cigarettes and tobacco products outside the United States.
Philip Morris International sells the thing your doctor tells you to quit: cigarettes. The company owns some of the world's best-known cigarette brands, including Marlboro outside the United States, and sells them in more than 170 countries. It does not sell cigarettes in America — that business was split off in 2008 and now runs separately — so its customers are adult smokers almost everywhere else on the planet.
The business is brutally simple. PMI manufactures cigarettes in big factories and ships them to distributors, retailers, and duty-free shops, who then sell them to smokers. Smokers pay at the counter, and a big chunk of that price is taxes that go to governments, not to PMI. The company earns its money on the remaining slice, and it makes up for shrinking cigarette volumes in many rich countries by raising prices — a strategy that has kept profits climbing even as the number of smokers falls. The obvious problem is that cigarettes kill people and are being pushed out of fashion. PMI's answer is a big bet on smoke-free products, especially heated tobacco sticks and nicotine pouches. Its flagship heated tobacco device, IQOS, heats tobacco instead of burning it, and the company says this is far less harmful than smoking — though health authorities and critics remain cautious. IQOS has become a genuine growth engine, particularly in Japan and Europe, and PMI has poured billions into it. It bought Swedish Match, the maker of ZYN nicotine pouches, to get a stronger foothold in the fast-growing oral nicotine market, especially in the United States. That bet is not without friction. Regulators around the world are tightening rules on flavored nicotine, marketing to young people, and menthol cigarettes, and some countries are moving toward outright cigarette bans. Meanwhile, PMI still makes most of its money from the old business, so it has to manage a slow decline in cigarettes while racing to build the next thing. The company pays a hefty dividend and buys back shares, returning cash to investors even as it spends heavily on new products — a sign of confidence that the smoke-free pivot will eventually carry the business.
So the story is a race: a giant, cash-rich cigarette seller trying to turn itself into a nicotine company that doesn't rely on lighting tobacco on fire, before the old business fades out from under it.
Saved answer · last researched 29 Oct 2026