Alternative tobacco and nicotine products in Portugal
Portugal defines heated tobacco as a novel tobacco product. In the country, heated tobacco is subject to the same restrictions as traditional cigarettes in terms of sales, advertising and public place usage. On this page you can determine commercial opportunities and regulatory restrictions of alternative and nicotine tobacco products in Portugal, as well as all find related stories that you must be on top of to develop a consistent strategy in the region.
Market background in Portugal: IQOS presence
Portugal is a western European country with over 10m inhabitants. The last Eurobarometer indicates that a quarter of the Portuguese population are smokers, slightly below the EU average.
On the other hand, 14% claimed to be former smokers and 60% never smokers – 92% of whom had never tried any tobacco product.
However, 97% of the Portuguese smoking population claimed to smoke daily – the EU average is 91%. In this context, Philip Morris International (PMI) launched Iqos in December 2015.
PMI initially opened a store in Lisbon and sold the product through a referral programme in which only a selected group of registered users could buy them. By doing that, Portugal became the fourth country worldwide to sell Iqos, after Japan, Italy and Switzerland.
In Q3 of 2016, Iqos widened its distribution points and started selling its products all over the country, initially through its affiliate company, Tabaqueira.
Since then, heated tobacco – represented in Portugal only by Iqos – has reached high levels of popularity online.
