Author Topic: Greece: going up in smoke?  (Read 2813 times)

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Online Maik

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Greece: going up in smoke?
« on: Saturday, 13 May, 2017 @ 16:21:27 »
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Philip Morris is counting on Greece going up in smoke

When Philip Morris International Inc. announced in March that it would invest 300 million euros ($328 million) in its Greek unit, the cigarette maker was betting on an economy that had cratered as the country was struggling to strike a deal with its creditors.

The New York-based company and its wholly owned subsidiary, Papastratos, didn’t want to wait. Now, with review talks completed between the government and creditors, Christos Harpantidis, Papastratos’s chief executive officer, says the company feels vindicated.

The investment from the manufacturer of Marlboro and Chesterfield cigarettes is among the biggest such inflows for Greece since the debt crisis in 2009, and is a much-needed boost for a country that has seen its economy shrink by more than a quarter. Europe’s most-indebted nation needs investments that can rekindle its economy as it works on putting structural changes in place to comply with the terms of its bailout.

Philip Morris and Papastratos have begun transforming the unit’s factory in Aspropyrgos, a suburb of Athens, into a producer of tobacco sticks to be used in its state-of-the-art smoke-free systems called IQOS. The plan is to use Greece as one of the company’s bases to produce sticks for exports to more than 30 countries by the end of 2017.

Papastratos’s factory currently produces about 12 billion cigarettes per year. When the transformation of the factory is complete, the plant will be producing 20 billion IQOS, Harpantidis estimates. IQOS products are electronic devices that heat specially prepared and blended tobacco. The system heats the tobacco just enough to release nicotine-containing vapor without burning the tobacco.

Philip Morris chose Greece as a new hub to produce what it believes will be the future of the industry because it wanted to take advantage of its geographical position and its good quality tobacco, the executive said. Greece produces about 30,000 metric tons of tobacco a year, grown mainly in East Macedonia, Thrace and Katerini -- all in the northern part of the country.
http://www.independent.ie/business/world/philip-morris-is-counting-on-greece-going-up-in-smoke-35709278.html