Death Marketing-1

Light up at cheap: JTI encouraging smoking with another new brand

The multinational tobacco company Japan Tobacco International (JTI) has introduced another cheap cigarette brand named Real in local market. The retail price of each stick of Real stands at only BDT 4. Colorful stickers and posters declaring the price of this new brand have already flooded points of sales across the country. The strategy that JTI has employed in Bangladesh is to expand the market of low-tier cigarettes by introducing more and more new brands and thus encouraging the low-income people in lighting up at a cheap rate. It should be noted that the existing tobacco pricing and taxation measures allows four price slabs in cigarettes and the companies introduce a wide variety of new low-tier brands that let the users to switch slabs and escape the brunt of price increase, set by the govt. to discourage smoking. Anti-tobacco activists’ long-term demand to reduce the number of price slabs always falls on deaf ears. At this point, it is urgent for the govt. to formulate and implement an effective tobacco taxation policy to prevent tobacco companies from taking advantage of any loophole.