It is a widely known fact that tobacco companies around the world make huge profits out of selling their products, cigarettes. These companies with questionable corporate social responsibility, according to a recent article, are facing the problem of a new substitute for cigarettes in general, the electronic cigarette. The article claims that the consumption of the electronic cigarette will overtake that of regular cigarettes as quickly as within the next decade, as studies do show that this type of cigarette are much safer and do less harm to the human body compared to their standard counterparts.
This may be an issue for certain companies such as Phillip Morris, a leading tobacco brand, as this entrant of a new competitor may cause the sales of their main source of revenue to drop sharply. A way these older cigarette companies may deal with this issue however, may be to implement market development and take advantage of this boom in popularity in e-cigarettes. If these tobacco companies can successfully integrate electronic cigarettes into their product pool, they may avoid the negative implications of the trend of decreasing standard cigarette usage.