21 Mayıs 2022 Cumartesi

About PMI’s Integrated Report 2021| What I Read and Understand


On 17 May 2022, Philip Morris International (PMI) announced its Integrated Report for 2021 which describes how the company is delivering on its purpose and provides detailed information about its strategic vision, performance, governance, and value creation. The content of the report is shaped by a formal sustainability materiality assessment conducted during 2021. This is the third annual integrated report of PMI, and as a PMI employee with interest in sustainability, this report is exciting read for me.

About PMI

For those who are not familiar with the company, report starts with general information about the company. Accordingly Philip Morris International is a leading international tobacco company working to deliver a smoke-free future and evolving its portfolio for the long-term to include products outside of the tobacco and nicotine sector.

The company’s current product portfolio primarily consists of cigarettes and smoke-free products, including heat-not-burn, vapor, and oral nicotine products, which are sold in markets outside the U.S. Since 2008, PMI has invested more than USD 9 billion to develop, scientifically substantiate, and commercialize innovative smoke-free products for adults who would otherwise continue to smoke, with the goal of completely ending the sale of cigarettes.


With a strong foundation and significant expertise in life sciences, in February 2021, PMI announced its ambition to expand into wellness and healthcare areas and deliver innovative products and solutions that aim to address unmet patient and consumer needs.

CEO’s Message

As a finance professional, I am focused on seeing numbers and PMI’s CEO Jacek Olczak clearly states the numbers while sharing the company’s objectives:

"Our ambition is that by 2025, at least USD 1 billion of our net revenues will derive from these adjacent avenues of growth, marking an initial milestone for a business with potential to grow much further over the longer term. In 2021, we kept our relentless focus on that ambition, dedicating 99 percent of our research and development and 73 percent of our commercial expenditure to smoke-free products. Moreover, smoke-free products represented over 29 percent of our adjusted net revenues and, by year-end, we estimate that more than 15 million adults in total had switched to IQOS and stopped smoking. The strong position of our smoke-free business has allowed us to accelerate our timeline; early in 2021, we announced our ambition that by 2025 our smoke-free products would be sold in 100 markets and at least 50 percent of our net revenues would derive from smoke-free products."

CFO’s Message

What I notice in PMI is that our CFO Emmanuel Babeau shows an ownership on sustainability. The level of importance he gives is also clear from the message he shares within the report:

"Strategy, Finance, and Sustainability—the three teams I lead—play a critical role within today’s PMI and have the capacity to establish a roadmap for success that not only responds to short-term needs but also accounts for medium- and long-term impacts. To achieve our ambitions, it has been of paramount importance for our entire organization to recognize that sustainability and financial performance are mutually reinforcing and part of the same strategy. That is why integrated reporting is a top priority: It allows all our employees, including management, as well as the company’s Board, our shareholders, and other stakeholders to understand how our financial and nonfinancial performance are interrelated."

And Chief Sustainability Officer’s Message

Our CSO Jennifer Motles highlights that PMI dedicated much of 2021 to strengthening its governance and better integrating sustainability into its corporate strategy.

Jennifer also states that "PMI’s Sustainability Index consists of 19 KPIs, which measure progress toward the 11 goals in our 2025 Roadmap. We aim to continuously improve our performance and drive material and measurable progress—all communicated through open and clear reporting and disclosure."

Transforming for Good

Transforming the company is not only about substituting one product with a new one. It is described in a holistic way:

Sustainability stands at the core of PMI’s transformation and helps address some of the challenges resulting from the transition, while spurring innovation and better positioning the company for success over the long haul. The complexity of our strategy comes from simultaneously managing the impacts of two value chains—the one we are aiming to move away from (our cigarette portfolio) and the one we are moving towards (our smoke-free portfolio)— while also managing the impacts of the transition itself.

Anchoring Sustainability at the core of Strategy

For PMI, sustainability is more than just a means to minimize negative externalities and mitigate risks while maximizing operational efficiency and resource optimization. It is stated in bold:

"We can only achieve our purpose by embedding sustainability in all we do."

The biggest and most pressing negative externality PMI’s strategy aims to address is the health impacts of cigarette smoking. This is the most important contribution we can make to public health and is the cornerstone of PMI’s purpose and business strategy. Addressing this critical issue requires a three-part approach:

1. Develop better alternatives to smoking 

Research, develop, and commercialize scientifically substantiated nicotine-containing products that are less harmful than cigarettes

2. Accelerate smoking decline 

Provide broad access to adult smokers, who otherwise would not quit smoking, to ensure these products accelerate the decline of smoking prevalence

3. Make cigarettes obsolete 

Purposefully work to ensure these products ultimately replace cigarettes, driving their obsolescence

Despite its critical importance, achieving a smoke-free future is not PMI’s final horizon. PMI is simultaneously exploring adjacent opportunities for growth in wellness and healthcare, leveraging the capabilities we have accrued and developed while transforming our business. It is through these avenues of growth that we will achieve our ultimate goal: becoming a business that has a net positive impact on society and the environment.

Risk Management

PMI’s Global Head of Risk & Controls, Marie-Pauline Lauret mentions that they have various risk evaluation mechanisms in place to support the development of tailored strategies and responses for their priority ESG issues along our value chain. Focused on environmental and social issues, some of these assessments include human rights risks saliency mapping, periodic climate risk and opportunities assessments, product life cycle assessments, and deforestation and water risk assessments.

Product Impact

PMI’s CEO Jacek Olczak clearly states that:

“We can make an important contribution to accelerating the end of smoking. To achieve this objective, we are dedicating the vast majority of our resources to commercializing our smoke-free products. Everyone within our organization—regardless of business function—plays a crucial role in delivering on this purpose. We recognize that PMI alone cannot achieve a smoke-free future. Such systemic change requires a collaborative multistakeholder approach. In particular, we actively advocate for others in the industry to follow our lead by transforming their businesses, phasing out cigarettes, and reporting transparently on progress.”

Pre-transformation (in 2015), PMI’s combustible product volume totaled 881 billion units, or 99.9 percent of our shipment volume ratio, and, since then, in only seven years, it has declined by more than 26 percent. Over the same period, PMI’s smoke-free shipment increased to 95 billion units, representing 12.8 percent of our shipment volume in 2021.

What about the goal? Intentionally work toward phasing out cigarettes by ensuring that smoke-free products represent at least 30 percent of its shipment volumes and more than half of its net revenues by 2025 while continuing to reduce its combustible shipment volume.

In short, a future where PMI’s success is no longer based on cigarettes is targeted.

Appropriate Regulation and Taxation to Drive Cigarette Obsolescence

To speed up the process, regulators and public health authorities can ensure that adult smokers have access to accurate information about smoke-free products. They can introduce product standards to ensure that only scientifically substantiated smoke-free products are commercialized. And, through riskproportionate regulation and taxation, they can provide the right incentives to encourage adults who smoke to switch from cigarettes to less harmful, scientifically substantiated alternatives and incentivize manufacturers to direct their investments and R&D toward these better products. The acceptability of smoke-free products for adult smokers must always be balanced against the objective of minimizing use by unintended audiences such as never smokers, former smokers, and youth.

What about Countries that do not Permit Smoke-Free Products Sale?

There is a position state for those countries which do not permit smoke-free products sale:

Currently, some countries do not permit the sale of smoke-free products. We nevertheless continue to engage with stakeholders in these markets to advocate for regulatory frameworks that support tobacco harm reduction. We do not believe that banning smoke-free products is a rational policy, especially considering that these countries permit the sale of the most harmful forms of tobacco and nicotine consumption: cigarettes and other combustible tobacco products. Banning smoke-free alternatives runs counter to the aim of ending cigarette use.

Informing the World about the Smoke-free Category

Smoke-free alternatives are a new product category and are still relatively unfamiliar to most people. In 2019, PMI launched “Unsmoke”—a global corporate campaign deployed across various online and offline communications channels to address widespread misconceptions about the smokefree category and the concepts that underpin it.

The campaign’s core message is simple:

If you don’t smoke, don’t start. If you smoke, quit. If you don’t quit, change.

Currently, the campaign encompasses two distinct strands:

Unsmoke Your World (UYW): Calls for positive change by reinforcing that quitting tobacco and nicotine altogether is the best choice and informing the adult general public that better, smokefree alternatives exist for those adult smokers who would otherwise continue smoking. It also encourages the public to get involved and calls for regulation that would allow adult smokers access to—and information about—better alternatives.

Unsmoke Your Mind (UYM): Speaks to the regulatory and scientific community and other stakeholders with an interest in tobacco harm reduction policy. UYM challenges misconceptions around the smoke-free category and calls for an open and transparent conversation to support risk-proportionate regulation that differentiates smoke-free products from cigarettes. It also urges policymakers to put science and evidence at the center of decision-making


Operational Impact

PMI’s vision of a smoke-free future helps to attract and retain talent. The opportunity to contribute to achieving the company’s purpose is compelling to many, as is the chance to make a positive societal impact.

For more about PMI and its integrated report 2021, please visit:

https://pmidotcom3-prd.s3.amazonaws.com/docs/default-source/pmi-sustainability/pmi-integrated-report-2021.pdf

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