What does the sale of contraband cigarettes in France weigh? While the price of a pack of cigarettes will follow inflation and will increase by 50 cents next year, Jeanne Pollès, president of Philip Morris France, believes that this will push the French to buy elsewhere than at the tobacconist.
Moreover, the parallel market is already very present according to her: “The statistics are alarming. Each year, it progresses. Today, it is estimated that 35% of cigarette consumption comes out of the legal network of tobacconists, 29% which are counterfeit or contraband”, she said on RMC. An overestimated figure according to a parliamentary report, published last year, which looked into the question and which estimated that the reliability of this estimate is “regularly questioned”.
In the parliamentary report, we find the 29% put forward by the boss of Philip Morris France. This figure comes from a study by the consulting firm KPMG (2021 edition) which has been looking at the parallel tobacco market for ten years. Except that this study, notes the parliamentary report, is disputed. Firstly because it is partly financed by… Philip Morris, and also because the methodology used is the subject of criticism. This is the so-called “packet pick-up” method. Clearly, the authors of the study are based on empty packets picked up randomly in a sample of cities and neighborhoods, which excludes, for example, the packet of cigarettes that a smoker can throw away at home in his own garbage can.
This way of estimating the parallel market, according to anti-tobacco associations, has the effect of overestimating the true volume of cigarettes resulting from smuggling or counterfeiting.
There are other figures that try to estimate the parallel market in France. The French Observatory for Drugs and Drug Addiction and Public Health France have conducted several studies. The first, published in 2005, estimated that the parallel market represented less than 15% of total tobacco sales.
According to the parliamentary report, which is based on other more recent assessments, the parallel market now represents between 15 and 25% of the total volume of cigarettes consumed in France. That is to say a lower estimate than the figure put forward by Philip Morris.