Yesterday British American Tobacco declared that it had purchased CN Creative Limited, a company which is located in UK and which specializes in the production of electronic cigarette technologies designed to provide smokers with a less dangerous alternative to regular cigarettes and to help smokers quitting smoking.
At the moment, CN Creative, which possesses research and development facilities, offers a number of electronic cigarette products on the market along with new, revolutionary e-cigarette technologies in the development pipeline.
Kingsley Wheaton, Director of Corporate and Regulatory Affairs at British American Tobacco, stated: “The key business of the company is tobacco and the aim is to offer adult smokers, who are looking for safer alternatives to cigarettes, reduced-risk products that will satisfy their diverse requirements. The company considers the revolutionary e-cig technologies that CN Creative has been elaborating during several years will help BAT reach this aim.”
The purchase of CN Creative is a normal extension of British American Tobacco’s strategy to tobacco harm reduction that has been innovating over several years.
The acquisition of CN Creative signifies the first British purchase of an electronic cigarette company by a one of the large cigarette firms. It occurred when the European Commission decided to make the regulation of smokeless cigarettes tighter.
Negotiations between BAT and CN Creative are known to have been conducting for a couple of months.
CN is one of few firms to have taken advantage from the Government’s £200m Future Technologies Fund, which was established by the Labour administration to provide British firms with a stable foothold in life sciences.
CN Creative develops, produces and markets electronic “Intellcig”, which it states is the top-selling electronic cigarette brand in the world, as a tobacco free alternative to cigarettes in more than 20 worldwide markets.
CN Creative is headed by Dale Pfost, a partner at Advent Life Sciences, one of the firm’s investors. The firms’s creators are probably to make a considerable sum from the acquisition by British American Tobacco.
The tobacco industry’s largest members are aiming to develop trustworthy products which present alternatives to regular cigarettes at a time when pressure on main firms is unrelenting.
New European Union proposals to print graphic cigarette warning labels have met strong lobbying from the cigarette companies but are widely-considered as unavoidable.
