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Imperial Tobacco Group Plc, Europe’s second-largest publicly traded cigarette maker, plans to cut 2,440 European jobs after buying Altadis SA for 12.6 billion euros ($20 billion) earlier this year.

Six of 58 factories will shut as staff numbers fall by about 6 percent, Imperial said today. The plants slated for closure are located in its hometown of Bristol, England, as well as Spain, France, Germany and Slovakia. The maker of Davidoff cigarettes fell 3.3 percent in London trading as the plan failed to persuade some analysts to lift their savings estimates.

Western European tobacco companies have eliminated jobs as governments restrict smoking and advertisements. Gareth Davis, Imperial’s chief executive officer since the company was spun off from Hanson Plc in 1996, has beat cost-savings goals consistently since the cigarette maker bought German rival Reemtsma in 2002 and then cut 4.4 percent of its jobs.

Expectations for today’s announcement “got carried away,'’ wrote Jonathan Leinster, an analyst at UBS in London, who repeated his “sell'’ rating on the stock today. He left his savings estimates unchanged and said he’s “not satisfied'’ with expense reduction related to the Altadis merger.

Almost half of the job cuts, or 1,060 positions, will take place in France, equating to almost a quarter of Imperial’s local payroll. The company stuck to forecasts for expenses of 600 million euros for the reductions and plant closings and annual cost savings of 400 million euros by the year through September 2012.

Shares Retreat

Imperial fell 64 pence to 1,879 pence in London trading. The stock has declined 20 percent in 2008 after rising more than sixfold in the prior eight years.

The cigarette maker will need to negotiate with unions over the job cuts and gain approval from the French and Spanish governments. Plans to reduce payrolls have sparked strikes this year by French workers from hospital staff to employees of newspaper Le Monde.

“They’re brutally tearing the company apart,'’ Jorge Tome, a representative of Spain’s Comisiones Obreras union, said in an e-mailed statement. “Once again they’re showing that the only thing that counts is profit and not a social commitment.'’

The takeover of Madrid-based Altadis added about 27,000 employees to Imperial’s work force. The Iberian company, which was formed when Spain and France merged their tobacco monopolies in 1999, makes cigarettes under brands including Gauloises and Gitanes and also is the world’s largest cigar manufacturer.

BEIJING—Li Zhigang inhaled deeply from a cigarette while sitting on his haunches last week near the Beijing Railway Station before deciding there was no way that tighter smoking regulations would change where or when he would grab a smoke.

Li, a 30-year-old real estate salesman, said he could support tighter rules in theory but could not see himself changing his habits.

When I was younger I have had Candy cigarettesthat were real candy and did not contain tobacco, but it was fun back then to pretend I was smoking like mum and dad. Now I am 30 years old and I still have never smoked, but we are seeing Candy Cigarettes coming back and this time they have real tobacco in them.
This product is created because the tobacco industry knows that first-time users find smoking unpleasant, so they create flavorings with sugars like Winter Mocha Mint, Warm Winter Toffee and flavours are used like grape, cherry, peach, strawberry and chocolate. Some of these products have been given nicknames like Barbie Camel, which sounds like it’s for girls.
How do you feel about real candy flavored cigarettes, is it right or wrong and do you feel children will be attracted to these tobacco sweets?

In a victory for the tobacco industry, a federal appeals court threw out on Thursday an $800 billion class-action lawsuit on behalf of smokers who said they had been misled that light cigarettes were safer than regular ones.
Plaintiffs’ lawyers wanted to represent millions of people across the country who had smoked light cigarettes. But the court, saying it was impossible to generalize about why smokers chose light cigarettes, ruled that the group could not be treated as a class. Instead, smokers wanting to sue over the issue would have to do so individually.
There might be various reasons for a smoker to choose a light brand other than “the belief that lights were a healthier alternative,” the ruling said. Other possibilities are that a lights smoker “was unaware of that representation, preferred the taste of lights, or chose lights as an expression of personal style.”
Even though the ruling had been generally expected, and tobacco company stocks were little affected by the decision, analysts still viewed it as positive for the industry.
Several experts said the ruling, the latest in a string of industry victories in cases involving light cigarettes, relieved the tobacco industry of potentially billions in damages and could also deter other similar class-action lawsuits around the country. “It may be persuasive to judges around the country who might well be watching it,” said Carl W. Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond.

For the first time since Philip Morris, Esq., opened a tobacco shop on Bond Street in London in 1847, the company’s U.S. and international businesses will be separate.
The Altria Group Inc. holding company split its two cigarettes units on Friday, sealing the deal by giving its shareholders stock in the newly independent Philip Morris International. Altria now consists of Philip Morris USA, cigar maker John Middleton Inc., a money-management arm and a 28.6 percent stake in Britain-based beer maker SABMiller PLC. It will move its headquarters to Richmond, Va., from Midtown Manhattan.
Both Philip Morris companies produce Marlboros. PMUSA also makes Virginia Slims, Parliament and Basic cigarettes while PMI makes the L&M, Bond Street and other brands.
The split is not only the final step to a restructuring that began in 2004, it essentially rolls back a strategy to turn the Philip Morris Cos., as it used to be called, into a general consumer products company. It widened its product offerings beyond cigarettes and beer in 1985 with the $5.6 billion acquisition of General Foods.
By 2003, it had adopted the Altria name. But in November 2004, it announced its plan to spin-off of Altria’s remaining majority stake in Kraft Foods Inc. and separate the two tobacco units, reversing the idea of keeping the disparate holdings under one corporate umbrella.
The breakup frees Philip Morris International from legal and public relations concerns here in the U.S. In preparation, PMI has created a slew of new Marlboro-branded products for fast-growing markets around the world. Some of the cigarettes are designed to cater to local tastes: the clove-based Marlboro Mix 9 in Indonesia; thicker Marlboro Wides in Western Europe, Japan and Mexico; and Marlboro Fresh Mint and Crisp Mint in Hong Kong.
Shareholders got one share of Philip Morris International stock for every one share of Altria they own. Altria will keep its MO ticker and Philip Morris International will adopt the PM ticker. The board has announced dividends that are equivalent to Altria’s before the split, and said it would buy back $7.5 billion in shares over two years.
The larger PMI, which operates in more than 160 countries, earned revenue of $55.1 billion in 2007, compared PMUSA’s $18.49 billion.
Louis Camilleri, who was chief executive of Altria, is the new CEO of the international business. PMI has an office in New York but most of its staff works out of a Lausanne, Switzerland, office. While PMI escapes the shadow of pending and yet-to-be-filed lawsuits in the U.S., critics of the industry are wary of the damage its marketing power could have on consumers in poorer nations.
The U.N.’s World Health Organization issued a report in February that said the "tobacco epidemic" could claim 1 billion lives by the end of the century unless governments dramatically step up efforts to curb smoking. The agency reported that governments around the world collect more than $200 billion in tobacco taxes every year but spend less than one-fifth of 1 percent of that revenue on tobacco control.
"Faced with an epidemic that kills 5.4 million people each year, the world will not tolerate increased profits for a few, at the expense of the health and lives of so many," Kathy Mulvey, international policy director for Corporate Accountability International, said in a statement Friday.
Shares of Altria, trading on a when-issued basis without the value of PMI, fell 70 cents to $22.22 on Friday. Shares of PMI, on a when-issued basis, rose 38 cents to $51.06. Both will begin regular-hours trading Monday on the New York Stock Exchange. PMI shares will also trade on the NYSE Euronext Paris and SWX Swiss exchanges. Both will be on the Standard & Poor’s 100 and 500 Indices, Altria said in a statement Friday.