Pakistan Tobacco Company - Youth Access Prevention

We know how important it is that our marketing practices should not undermine efforts to prevent the use of our products by those underage. That’s why our operations in our markets worldwide are required to follow marketing principles which are globally consistent and demonstrate our commitment to marketing appropriately.

Our International Marketing Principles (IMP) provide detailed guidance on all aspects of our marketing of our combustible tobacco products. Central to them is our commitment that our marketing is aimed only at adult smokers and is not designed to engage or appeal to youth.

In addition to our strict requirement to only market to adult consumers of our products, we expect youth access prevention activities to be carried out in all our markets where we directly distribute our products and where these activities are permitted by local legislation. In 2016, we achieved this in all these types of markets.

Our commitment to only market our combustible tobacco products to adult smokers has long been supported by our global Youth Smoking Prevention (YSP) Guidance and activities for our operations worldwide.

In 2017, we revised and strengthened our approach further by developing new Youth Access Prevention (YAP) Guidelines for our operations to cover all our different product categories.

We were the first company in Pakistan to pilot a retailer education programme on youth smoke prevention in 1999 with the revised guidelines.