The first joint event for Tobacco Journal International and World Tobacco, World Tobacco India 2010, will be held at the Hyderabad International Convention Center, Hyderabad, India, from 21 to 22 April 2010. As well as the exhibition, it will feature a two-day conference, focusing entirely on leaf supplies. World Tobacco has not organised a dedicated leaf conference since 1992, when it was successful in bringing together leaf experts from all over the world.
India is a strong market to hold such a conference because, in spite of all recent regulations, cigarettes have continued to see growth in the past five years. While 2008 saw declines, owing to the unusually high taxes in 2007, it rebounded in 2009. Also, India is demographically very attractive. 65 per cent of the population are below the age of 35; potentially, this is a large segment of younger consumers with rising disposable incomes and a lower aversion to smoking. Additionally, India has low per capita cigarette consumption (141 sticks) compared with the global average. All these factors provide the tobacco industry with reasons to view India as a key market.
Learning about leaf
The conference will be devoted entirely to the international leaf tobacco market and the title is “The future supply of leaf tobacco”. Speakers will include tobacco manufacturers, leaf traders and merchants, governmental bodies and organisations representing the growers. The Tobacco Board of India is the official event sponsor, which is in turn part of the ministry of commerce of India.
Papers will be delivered on the future supply of flue-cured, oriental and burley leaf, and the future supply of tobacco from South and North America, Europe, China and, of course, India.
The following is a selection of confirmed speakers and topics for the conference:
21 April 2010
Conference chairman Antonio Abrunhosa, chief executive of the International Tobacco Growers’ Association (ITGA), will ensure proceedings flow well, guiding speakers towards the hot topics. He will also hold a welcome speech.
 | Janardhan Redd, CEO of ILTD Leaf Tobacco, will be looking at “The importance of leaf tobacco as a cash crop”. |
ILTD is the leaf tobacco arm of ITC Limited. It boasts a century-old refinement in systems and processes and generations of links with Indian farmers through which it has displayed concerted crop development efforts.
| Dr Suresh Babu, chairman of the Tobacco Board of India, will be speaking about “The future of Indian tobacco”. |
Recognising the need to regulate production, promotion of overseas marketing and to control recurring instances of imbalances in supply and demand, the government of India established the Tobacco Board, in place of Tobacco Export Promotion Council, under the Tobacco Board Act of 1975. The Board came into existence in 1976 and has its headquarters in Guntur, Andhra Pradesh.
| Mike Stevens, head of leaf at BAT, will be providing a paper on “Making the leaf supply chain sustainable”. |
BAT purchases around 390,000 tonnes of tobacco leaf a year, about 80 per cent of it by volume from farmers and suppliers in emerging economies. The company aims to ensure that it only purchases leaf from responsible and sustainable sources.
| Jürgen Tiemann of Imperial Tobacco will be examining “The future supply of flue-cured”. |
Imperial Tobacco’s products are available in over 160 countries worldwide. It reports that its geographic diversity and versatile, multi-product portfolio provides business resilience and a strong platform for future growth.
| Tommy Rowland of Universal Leaf Tobacco will supply “An overview of the Asia-Pacific region”. |
Universal Corporation, headquartered in Richmond, Virginia, was founded in 1918. Universal, through its subsidiaries and affiliates, is the world’s leading leaf tobacco merchant and processor. The largest portion of the company’s business involves the procurement, processing, packing, and supply of flue-cured and burley tobacco to manufacturers of consumer tobacco products.
| Noyal Gurel of Sunel Tobacco will focus on “The future supply of tobacco”. |
Sunel, founded in 1939 and owned by the Gurel family, is one of Turkey’s oldest leaf tobacco dealers. However, the company’s roots date back to the 1920s, when the launch of its present venture was based on events intimately intertwined with the history of the Turkish Republic.
| Daniel Green of the Burley Stabilisation Corporation (BSC) will be discussing “The future supply of burley”. |
BSC purchases leaf tobacco direct from farmer-members in the traditional burley-producing regions of the United States, where high-quality tobacco has been grown for centuries. Procurement of burley is allocated across the production belt to result in the optimal mix of burley from across the production region. Most of the tobacco is produced along the Tennessee-Kentucky border, with small amounts coming from western North Carolina and southwest Virginia.
22 April 2010
Chairman for this day of the conference will be Ram Poddar, chairman of the Tobacco Institute of India, who will also deliver the Chairman’s welcome.
| Paul Neumann of Japan Tobacco International (JTI) will provide an opinion from “A manufacturer’s view”. |
Japan Tobacco International is the international tobacco business of Japan Tobacco, the world’s third-largest industry player, with a global market share of eleven per cent and market capitalisation of around USD 32 billion (EUR 21.88 billion). In the summer of 2009, the company surprised the tobacco industry with a series of acquisitions in the leaf sector and the establishment of a joint venture with leaf-supplying companies Hail & Cotton and J.E.B in the US.
| Carlo Sacchetto, director of FETRATAB, looks at “The changing face of European leaf – the decline of subsidies”. |
FETRATAB was created in 1994 and groups a large majority of tobacco processors in Europe, including the national associations of processors.
TJI report
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