Forgive me, as I can't find the stat, but I remember reading somewhere that current estimates figure that in 10 years vapers will out number smokers.
Bill Godshall figured in 2013 that by 2023 ecig sales (all products and refills) would overtake cigarette sales, and Bonnie Herzog of Wells Fargo says the same thing going by market data. However that all depends on a favourable retail climate, which may not prevail - everyone who depends on revenues ultimately dependent on cigarette sales is doing their best to ban ecigs, globally. A black market cannot support that kind of growth.
It's funny because I can just imagine BT sitting in a boardroom looking at the first e cigs and saying.... Yea these will never work. How things have progressed in just a few short years.
Yes, they certainly did exactly this for several years. Imperial Tobacco were the last of the non-believers, and their board were still saying this up to about 18 months ago; then they must have had a boardroom revolution or something because they went from being ecigs' biggest denialists to big-time players: they even bought up every patent they could find.
It took a long time for BT to wake up, but it doesn't alter anything except much how long it will take them to get decent products in the stores. Every ecig vendor has to make that journey and cigarette companies are no different: their first products are sub-standard. However they hold all the cards: this is a regulated market and the regulators are owned by BT's biggest friends, pharma. The pharmaceutical industry are strong supporters of cigarette sales as smoking generates significant revenues for them (it cannot possibly be any less than 10% of their annual $1 trillion global gross). We know that in the UK, pharma makes more than the cigarette trade does from smoking, and it could easily be double (as in a socialised state, everyone has to be treated medically and treated well, no matter their condition or what caused it); and pharma supplies the highly-profitable drugs.
Pharma owns the regulators and they need smoking. Therefore - no matter what you hear to the contrary - the cigarette trade will be given priority in the ecig market, and they will also be left to decide how big vaping is allowed to get (as they will own both cigarette sales and ecig sales). It would be very optimistic to think BT will either change over to ecigs, or let the small guys run riot in the market. Pharma makes the laws and pharma will not allow either of those scenarios.
