British American Tobacco Cambodia - Brands and Products
Our cigarette business is founded on understanding and meeting the preferences of adult smokers in all parts of the world.
Not all cigarettes are the same. Smokers around the world prefer many different tastes and strengths and our companies aim for excellence in every step of manufacturing.
Our companies work to understand the preferences of adult consumers and to design cigarettes to meet them. It’s the preferences of adult consumers that guide our tobacco blends – the mix of tobaccos that we use – and we work to ensure that these grades are available long-term to keep the tastes of our products consistent.
Food-type ingredients and flavourings are added to some types of cigarettes – typically American style blends – to balance the natural tobacco taste, replace sugars lost in curing and give individual brands their characteristic flavour and aroma. Other ingredients control moisture protect against microbial degradation and act as binders or fillers.
Nicotine is not added in making cigarettes. It occurs naturally in all varieties of tobacco plants.
The filter, paper and level of filter ventilation are all chosen to affect the sensory strength and smoke yield of the cigarette. At each stage, there is constant quality control and testing.
Main parts of a cigarette
What happens when a cigarette burns?
To understand cigarette design, it helps to know how a cigarette burns. It is the combustion process – the burning of the cigarette – that produces tar. If hay were burned instead of tobacco, it would also produce a type of tar. When an item burns, it produces tiny particles mixed with gases – this is smoke. A cigarette filter traps some of these particles.
When a smoker puffs on a cigarette, whole smoke, including both fine particles and gases, is sucked through the tobacco rod and the filter. Gases pass through the filter and some particles are trapped in it. It is this particulate matter, minus nicotine and water, that is called tar.
Smoke has over 4,000 constituents, many of them also found in the air we breathe and in our food. These constituents include the emissions listed on packs, such as tar, nicotine and carbon monoxide. Water vapour is also produced by the combustion, because the burning of any organic material breaks down the chemical components and produces water.
Filter biodegradability
Our filter tips are biodegradable over a period of between a month and three years, depending on environmental conditions. Although we are researching more rapid breakdown, at present we know of no practical way of making consumer-acceptable filters that would degrade so quickly that they would not cause short-term littering problems.
Our brands
Our business is not about encouraging people to start smoking or to smoke more, but about meeting the preferences of adults, who have chosen to consume tobacco, and differentiating our brands from our competitors.
British American Tobacco Cambodia is the leading cigarette company in the market, and manufactures and distributes the international brand State Express 555, with tailored brand lines to meet different needs of different consumer segments.
The health risks of smoking?
Along with the pleasures of smoking there are real risks of serious diseases such as lung cancer, respiratory disease and heart disease, and for many people, smoking is difficult to quit.
Smoking is a cause of various serious and fatal diseases, including lung cancer, emphysema, chronic bronchitis, and heart diseases.
Studies
The health risks of smoking are derived from epidemiology. Epidemiology is a statistics-based science dealing with risks among large groups of people rather than with individuals. Through questionnaires and observations of people, epidemiological studies can identify the incidence of disease in a given group, such as smokers, and compare it with the incidence in another group, such as non-smokers.
Over many years epidemiological studies have consistently reported a much higher incidence of certain diseases among smokers compared with non-smokers. The studies also report that the risks are reduced after quitting and that quitting earlier has by far the best effect on reducing risks.
Traditionally, epidemiology has been used to identify associations that point to possible causes of a disease, providing direction for thorough laboratory investigations. With smoking, many laboratory investigations over the years have proved more problematic, and science has not to date been able to identify biological mechanisms which can explain with certainty the statistical findings linking smoking and certain diseases, nor has science to date been able to clarify the role of particular smoke constituents in these disease processes.
This means that science is still to determine which smokers will get a smoking related disease and which will not. Nor can science tell if an individual became ill solely because they smoked. This is, in part, because all the diseases that are associated with smoking also occur in life-long non-smokers.
We do not point out these scientific limitations to cast doubt on the fact that smoking is a cause of serious disease. An important point is that the lack of complete understanding about the biological aspects of the disease mechanisms, and the role of particular smoke constituents, create uncertainty for efforts to design less harmful cigarettes. British American Tobacco's work for many years has included, and still does, research into the assessment of potentially less harmful cigarettes. British American Tobacco remains committed to this work, although the scientific uncertainties make it a major challenge.
What people should consider:
- Smoking is a cause of various serious and fatal diseases.
- The health risks in groups vary by the amount smoked, being highest in those that smoke for more years, more cigarettes per day.
- The risks reduce in groups of people who quit smoking, and the reductions increase from quitting earlier.
- Experts advise against smoking during pregnancy – and we agree.
- The only way to be certain of avoiding the risks of smoking is not to smoke.