Thursday, June 19, 2014

Mighty Corporation Makes it Double

Local cigarette manufacturer Mighty Corporation or Mighty Corp said that it will buy 10 million kilograms of tobacco products worth millions of pesos from farmers in Northern Luzon and elsewhere in the country.

Mighty Corp executive vice president Oscar Barrientos said to National Tobacco Administration (NTA) administrator Edgardo Zaragoza that it would buy tobacco from farmers 100% more than the 5 million kilograms his firm bought in 2013.

That means double income for the farmers.

“This is to assure our tobacco farmers of our willingness to help in response to the published report of the market leader in the tobacco industry to lessen production this year,” Barrientos said.

This debunked critics’ allegations that Mighty Corporation has been importing raw materials from foreign countries at low prices and is no longer buying tobacco from local farmers.

Barrientos said that Mighty Corp critics had been resorting to a disinformation campaign using convoluted data in an effort to undermine Mighty Corporation's tremendous increase of the tobacco industry's market shares.

Might Corp's shares surged to almost 20% of the low-priced cigarette brands last year from in 2012, resulting in the payment P8.2 billion in excise taxes.

Barrientos said the company’s market shares shot up after the government effectively implemented Republic Act 10352, or the new Sin Tax Law, that levelled the playing field in the multi-billion peso tobacco industry which was controlled by Philip Morris and Fortune Tobacco.

The new law that took 14 years to pass caused a tremendous migration of smokers from the expensive premium and sub-premium brands to low-priced cigarettes.

It also resulted in some smokers, because of economic reason, to simply quit the vice and thus validated health authorities’ estimate that the sin tax law would result in the decrease of the number of smokers in the country.

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