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As the tobacco industry begins to boom once again, CEO Gareth Davis is stepping down at Imperial Tobacco and leaving the role to his former chief operations officer Alison Cooper. With her strong finance background, ICAEW-qualified Cooper has taken a more unusual path to the top, defying the typical FD-to-CEO strategy. But how has she done it?
What’s happened?
Cooper has been with the group since 1999 and has held a range of senior roles including director of finance and planning before moving out of finance, becoming regional director western Europe and corporate development director.
Her background as COO will have broadened her knowledge of the tobacco industry and given her great strategic insight into the workings of the market. And even in her previous role at PwC she was heavily involved with mergers and acquisitions for the tobacco giant a key strategy for Imperial Tobacco going forward.
With her widely reported love of cigars, Cooper seems like a logical choice.
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Japan Tobacco Inc.'s (2914.TO) U.K. business is closing the gap on market leader Imperial Tobacco PLC (IMT.LN) and will retain its recent market share gains, despite pushing up prices at the end of this month, JT's U.K. managing director said Wednesday.
Daniel Torras told reporters at a briefing in London that the company had increased its U.K. cigarette market share to 40.8% in September, up 1.8 percentage points on a year earlier. Imperial Tobacco's share meanwhile fell 1.5 percentage points in the same period to 42.3%, he said.
"Since Oct. 2008, we've seen very dramatic share growth," he said, "we've had share growth in every single segment."
Torras said he was confident these gains can be retained despite the company's planned price increases on Nov. 24. "We don't expect any share loss," he said.
He said the company's momentum in the U.K. allowed it to take a lead with price increases rather than following Imperial's pricing action.
Imperial Tobacco reported solid fiscal 2009 results that confirm our thesis that the firm's positioning in value categories will give it a short-term performance boost. We are maintaining our fair value estimate.
Fiscal 2009 net tobacco revenue grew 5% after adjusting for foreign exchange movements and the acquisition of Altadis. We think this is very respectable, given the economic challenges in the firm's key markets, but we doubt that this level of growth will be sustainable in 2010. Imperial's product portfolio is concentrated in value categories, and volumes have benefited from smokers tightening their belts in recent quarters. However, if global consumer sentiment recovers next year and smokers resume their migration to more expensive brands, we expect the premium products of rivals such as British American Tobacco and Philip Morris International to more effectively exploit that trend.
Imperial's drive to cut costs yielded some results in fiscal 2009, with the operating margin increasing 130 basis points to 15.8%. Although we are impressed by this performance in a challenging environment, we expect the firm's newly acquired logistics business to face rising costs in the near term from higher energy prices.
When Alison Cooper formally takes the helm at Imperial Tobacco next May, the 43-year old will join a small group of women leaders of FTSE 100 companies – but it is the task of expanding the company that presents a bigger challenge.
In the UK, she joins a select few female chief executives including Dame Marjorie Scardino at Pearson, owner of the Financial Times, Cynthia Carroll at Anglo American and Katherine Garrett-Cox at Alliance Trust. She also becomes the second woman to run a big tobacco company, following Susan Ivey at Reynolds American.
Imperial Tobacco's chief executive of 13 years, Gareth Davis, is stepping down to make way for his chief operating officer, Alison Cooper - who is set to become only the fifth woman at the helm of a FTSE 100 company.
Alison Cooper will become the fourth woman chief executive in the FTSE 100 when she steps into Gareth Davis's shoes in May.
Mrs Cooper, 43, said that, under her leadership, Imperial would focus more on sales and less on acquisitions such as the purchase of Altadis, the Franco-Spanish tobacco company. "I would like to have a stronger reputation for driving sales," she said.
She joins Dame Marjorie Scardino at Pearson, the educational publisher and home to the Financial Times, Angela Ahrendts at Burberry, the fashion house, and Cynthia Carroll at Anglo American, the mining group, in the elite club of female FTSE 100 chief executives.
Alison Cooper will become the latest in the handful of women in charge of a FTSE 100 company when she takes the reins at Imperial Tobacco next May.
The 43-year-old mother of two, who admitted to a penchant for cigars, will replace longstanding chief executive Gareth Davis when he retires after 37 years at the Lambert & Butler cigarette maker.
Alison Cooper is set to become the second youngest female chief executive of a FTSE 100 company as she looks to put sales growth at the top of her agenda for the world's No 4 cigarette group Imperial Tobacco Plc (IMT.L)
Cooper, 43, was widely tipped to take over the top job at the maker of Lambert & Butler and Gauloises cigarettes next year after shadowing current CEO Gareth Davis for eight months.
Davis is set to retire next May, the day before his 60th birthday.
"Alison has worked closely on all the big deals with Gareth so the transition at the top of Imperial would appear to be very smooth," said one tobacco industry analyst.
Imperial Tobacco today announced strong Preliminary Results with operating profit for the enlarged group up 10 percent in the second half. Chief Executive Gareth Davis said the enhanced brand portfolio and the wider geographic footprint, allied with a focus on costs and sales, enabled the company to increase cigarette volumes by 10 percent.
Imperial also announced today that Mr Davis would be retiring in May 2010 and Chief Operating Officer Alison Cooper would be his successor.
Alison Cooper, who has been appointed as the new chief executive of the cigarette manufacturer Imperial Tobacco, said she wants the firm to be known for ‘sales growth’ as well as ‘cost control’.
But a quick scan through the firm’s full year results suggests that its focus on cost control has served it well and such a strategy could be the best approach in years ahead.
Unlike its only quoted rival in the UK, British American, whose acquisitions have been focused on growth markets such as Indonesia and Turkey, Imperial’s main focus has been the integration of Franco-Spanish rival Altadis, concentrating on synergies rather than growth.
Since October 1996 – shortly after Davis took the job on the company’s split from Hanson – shareholders have seen the FTSE All Share double . . .
Alcohol consumption, and gambling likewise, show no signs of dramatically abating. Arguably such habits are eventually encouraged by overly nannying states that set out to curb them, either through tax or regulation.
The worst expression of this unintended consequence is the rise of smugglers. High taxes make smuggling worthwhile. Illicit trade in cigarettes robs governments of expected income and creates an illegal market that trades outside regulations supposed to protect sections of society, such as children.
Having quit the weed several years ago, I’m not going to celebrate Imperial or its peers. But their continuing success shows just how ineffectual the current invasive style of government, that we tolerate, really is.
The number of women running blue-chip FTSE 100 companies leapt by 25% today with the appointment of Alison Cooper as chief executive of Imperial Tobacco, the cigarette group behind brands including Lambert & Butler, Gitanes and Rizla.
Cooper, 43, is to succeed Gareth Davis, who has led Imps for the past 14 years. Currently chief operating officer, Cooper will take over next May, bringing the total number of female FTSE 100 bosses to five. The others are Dame Marjorie Scardino of publisher Pearson, Angela Ahrendts of fashion group Burberry, Cynthia Carroll at miner Anglo American and Katherine Garrett-Cox of Alliance Trust.
Imperial's chairman, Ian Napier, said the company had conducted "a rigorous review of potential candidates both internally and externally" before naming Cooper as the new boss. She is now likely to become one of Britain's best-paid women. Last year she earned £1.3m, while Davis picked up £3.9m in pay, perks and other incentives.
Imperial Tobacco Group Plc said Chief Executive Officer Gareth Davis will retire after more than 37 years with Europe’s second-largest publicly traded cigarette company.
Davis, 59, will be succeeded by Alison Cooper, currently chief operating officer, when he retires in May. Cooper, 43, joined Bristol, England-based Imperial in 1999 after previously working for PricewaterhouseCoopers LP. Imperial also reported a 55 percent gain in full-year profit today. The stock rose as much as 3.9 percent in London trading.
Imperial Tobacco Group announced today that Gareth Davis, 59, chief executive officer (CEO), will be retiring on 12 May 2010.
The board also said that Alison Cooper, currently Imperial Tobacco Group chief operating officer, will succeed Davis as CEO with effect from 13 May 2010. Davis and Cooper will continue to work closely together to ensure an orderly handover during the next six months.
Primed with films like “The Initiative” and “Thank You for Smoking”, I was expecting my first interview with a representative of “Big Tobacco” in 2004 to be a mixture between the Godfather and Gordon Gekko. . . .
During the interview, Davis was surprisingly forthright about smoking and didn’t try to dodge the contentious issues.
The urbane chief executive began by asking us politely whether we should mind if he smoked. It usually makes me feel ill when people do, but, of course, as a journalist you always have to agree to this type of request because it is of paramount importance that your interview partner feels at ease. So the non-smoker resigns himself to a possible headache and a hefty bill at the dry cleaner’s.
Imperial Tobacco’s top man lit his first cigarette, just as he was saying that the dangers of peer pressure to smoke have been exaggerated. As he did so, all his press team reached for their cigarettes and lit up in unison. When he stubbed his cigarette out, they did so too.
As Mr Davis is quite a strong smoker this procedure occurred fairly frequently during the one-and-a-half hour interview. In fairness to him as CEO, however, I didn’t gain the impression that he was the instigator of this reflex-type behaviour or even expected it. . . .
The lesson is simple. If governments want to increase tax revenues, then raise taxes modestly over a long continuum, rather than do nothing for three years and then raise them substantially. It’s that huge volatility and surge in prices that triggers all the instability in the tobacco trade in any country.
Do you think the same will happen in Germany?
I can see history repeating itself there. The country has undergone a double shock, where a very significant tax increase was accompanied by a liberalisation of its borders. This was too much in one go and caused a huge spike in prices.
So the poor old smoker has no option, if he wants to go on smoking, as most smokers do, he has to down trade and find something else to smoke whether that be OTP (other tobacco products), private label, or buying cigarettes in the Czech Republic or Poland.