Big Tobacco Has Caught Startup Fever

In January, Philip Morris International Inc., the largest publicly traded tobacco company in the world, relaunched its website. Front and center on the home page, a freshly fashioned statement of purpose now greets visitors: “Designing a smoke-free future.” It’s a curious ambition to claim for a company that last year sold more than $26 billion in tobacco products. On the home page, there are no images of its familiar top sellers, no Marlboros or Virginia Slims. Instead, the page displays a provocative, open-ended question: “How long will the world’s leading cigarette company be in the cigarette business?”

Members of the press who’d been invited last fall to the Philip Morris International headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland, for a special briefing already knew the question was top of mind at the company, even if the answer was hazy. After Chief Executive Officer André Calantzopoulos walked into the airy meeting room and introduced himself, he pulled out something called an IQOS (pronounced “I-kose”), a tobacco gizmo that’s responsible, in part, for Philip Morris’s open flirtation with a life after cigarettes. Would the assembled reporters mind, he asked, if he partook in their presence? “There is no impact to the environment,” he assured them. “There is no danger for any of you.” Assent was granted, and for the next hour, as he spoke, Calantzopoulos intermittently raised the IQOS to his lips and inhaled deeply.