Tobacco Exports Worldwide

Germany drives tobacco market

BY Kelly Kiki

Published July 27, 2018

Global sales from tobacco cigarettes exports by country totaled more than US$ 29 billion in 2017. Germany is the leader, followed by Poland and USA. Overall, 20 countries shape the global market, as their shipments amount to US$ 26 billion or 89% of worldwide exported cigarettes. Let's zoom-in and get a closer look at them.

Apparently, cigarettes containing tobacco is the major type of domestic commodity exported by top-20 countries. Some of them, such as Brazil, USA, Argentina and Belgium, seem to also rely on domestic unmanufactured tobacco in the form of fermented leaves, stemmed or stripped (for further details on products, see here). Brazil exports mostly unmanufactured tobacco, stemmed or stripped and it dominates: In 2016, the product was the 298th most traded product out of 4,853 exported goods of any kind worldwide. Regarding re-exportation, China competes USA by exporting foreign goods; their dollar value difference is 258 million US$. Italy joins them by re-exporting unmanufactured tobacco.

Although Germany is amongst the most expensive suppliers, its exports dollar value is the 15% of total earnings worldwide, while it is closely followed by Poland and USA, each one of which earns 11% of the grand total.

Once we look back to see how top-5 exporters have been performing over the years, we realize that German exports keep growing from 2004 onwards, while USA starts decreasing its exports in late ’90s. Could that be correlated with smoke-free regulations and/or tobacco advertising restrictions? Indeed, the EU Directive on Tobacco Advertising (2003) bans cross-border advertising of tobacco products in radio, print and online media. But that could be an open question for further analysis in the future.