2024-01-10 19:47:28
Published on Jan 10, 2024 at 6:40 p.m. Updated on Jan 10, 2024 at 6:47 p.m.
The French are avoiding tobacco shops. According to figures published this Wednesday by Customs, cigarette sales continued to erode significantly in 2023. Less than 1.5 billion packs were sold last year, which represents a drop of more than 8% compared to 2022.
This decline in sales is not new. However, it is accelerating, after a more moderate slowdown around 2020-2021 (when lockdowns forced smokers to shop outside their homes). Sales have fallen by more than a quarter in five years: in 2018, more than 2 billion packets were still sold.
More than 11 euros per package
And it’s not that cigarette smokers have switched massively to other products. Sales of cigars and cigarillos are also declining (-6%), to fall below the billion unit mark in 2023. Rolling tobacco, with 5.7 tonnes sold (-10%), is not taking over either. more.
Only sales of “other smoking tobacco”, including tobacco for pipes or hookahs, are increasing (+10%). But they remain marginal (1 ton in 2023).
Does this mean that manufacturers in the sector are in serious financial difficulty? Or that the state coffers are no longer so generously supplied by smokers? Far from there. Because if the volumes sold drop visibly, the rapid rise in prices helps to compensate.
Mainly due to the increase in taxation, the price of a pack of cigarettes successively crossed the bar of 7 euros in 2018, 9 euros in 2020, 10 euros in 2021, then 11 euros in 2023. Since the increase on January 1 last, the package increased again by 50 cents, or even 1 euro depending on the brand. That of Marlboro Red, the best-selling according to tobacconists, rose to 12.50 euros.
Tobacco tax revenues are thus far from collapsing. They were expected to bring in 13.7 billion euros in 2023, almost as much as in 2022 (the Social Security budget expects nearly 14 billion in 2024). We must also add around 3.4 billion euros in VAT, and an almost equivalent amount in the pockets of manufacturers (and tobacconists).
In value terms, the French tobacco market would have slightly exceeded 20 billion euros (including more than 80% taxes) in 2023. It displays remarkable stability, given the collapse in volumes. In 2018, tobacco sales already represented 19 billion euros. The peak of 2020-2021, linked to Covid, allowed the market to reach more than 21.5 billion two years in a row, before returning to low water in 2022.
But the great concern of tobacconists – and of certain public health experts – is that the drop in sales does not in reality mask a transfer to imported cigarettes – whether these are cartridges brought back legally from border countries where prices are more accommodating, or contraband packages.
Measuring the reality of the phenomenon is difficult. But tobacco consumption seems far from falling in proportions similar to the fall in sales among tobacconists. According to the latest data from Public Health France, in 2022, more than three in ten French people aged 18 to 75 smoked (31.8%). There were even a quarter of them who did it daily (24.9%), or nearly 12 million people. These figures have been stable since 2019.
Tobacco professionals are convinced: if the French still smoke as much, while buying much fewer cigarettes, it is because they are getting their supplies elsewhere. Tobacconists are all the more worried that a recent court decision forces the government to quadruple the legal import quotas for tobacco from abroad by the end of March – which could further accelerate the decline in sales. in France in 2024.
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