Key Cigarette Brands Maintain Status as Most Valuable Chinese Brands

Source from:  Hunan Daily newspaper 06/27/2007

Furongwang and Baisha - two key competitive cigarette brands owned by Hunan Provincial China Tobacco Industry Corporation in south central China's Hunan Province - were once again ranked among the 50 most valuable Chinese brands at the 4th World Brand Summit and the Conference of China's 500 Most Valuable Brands held in Beijing on June 23. At the summit and conference co-sponsored by the World Brand Lab and the World Executive Weekly, Furongwang and Baisha took the 43rd and 47th places among the 50 most valuable Chinese brands, and were respectively valued at 17.21 billion yuan (2.15 billion U.S. dollars) and 16.793 billion yuan (2.1 billion U.S. dollars), up 3.46 billion yuan (432.5 million U.S. dollars) and 5.428 billion yuan (678.5 million U.S. dollars), indicating that both were becoming more and more influential. Furongwang and Baisha are two key competitive cigarette brands that Hunan Provincial China Tobacco Industry Corporation has been striving to develop. For five consecutive years, Baisha has been the No. 1 Chinese cigarette brand in terms of the annual single-brand cigarette output and sales volume in China. Furongwang has been one of the two leading high-grade Chinese cigarette brands. In November 2006, Changsha Cigarette Factory and Changde Cigarette Factory under Hunan Provincial China Tobacco Industry Corporation merged in a reform of the structure of resources of the tobacco industry of Hunan. Since then, Hunan Provincial China Tobacco Industry Corporation has had more specific targets for the development of big competitive cigarette brands. Over recent years, Changsha Cigarette Factory - the producer of Baisha - has been striving to promote the development of Baisha strictly in line with its advertising logo of "Fly Higher" and in accordance with the policy of applying new techniques and developing "green tobacco products", as well as by sponsoring high-profit public relations events such aerobatic shows, intended to enrich the cultural contents of Baisha and increase the value added of Baisha, contributing to enabling Baisha to become more famous. Meanwhile, Changde Cigarette Factory - the producer of Furongwang - has stuck to the policy of developing new products in accordance with the demand of VIPs and its advertising logo of "Passing over the value and enabling both of us to become successful" in strengthening relations with customers and enriching the cultural contents of Furongwang. For Hunan Provincial China Tobacco Industry Corporation, it has been striving to develop markets in other parts of China over recent years. In 2006, Hunan Provincial China Tobacco Industry Corporation sold 87.5 billion Baisha brand cigarettes (1.75 million cases), with half sold to other Chinese regions, and 15.25 billion Furongwang brand cigarettes (305,000 cases), with two-thirds sold to other Chinese regions. The merger of Changsha Cigarette Factory and Changde Cigarette Factory was part of the fundamental structural reform of China's tobacco industry since 2001 intended to incorporate big tobacco manufacturing enterprise groups, which was initiated by the State Tobacco Monopoly Administration. Enditem