Marlboro Cigarettes

Marlboro is a brand of cigarette made by Philip Morris. It is most famous for its billboard advertisements of the Marlboro Man. It is currently the best selling cigarette brand in the world. Philip Morris, a London-based cigarette manufacturer, created a New York subsidiary in 1902 to sell several of its cigarette brands, including Marlboro.

By 1924 they were advertising Marlboro as a woman's cigarette based on the slogan "Mild As May". The brand was sold in this capacity until World War II when the brand faltered and was temporarily removed from the market. At the end of the war three brands; Camel, Lucky Strike, and Chesterfield surfaced and established a firm hold on the cigarette market.During the 1950s Reader's Digest magazine published a series of articles that linked smoking with lung cancer. Philip Morris, and the other cigarette companies took notice and each began to market filtered cigarettes. The new Marlboro with a filtered tip was launched in 1955. The brand is named after Great Marlborough Street, the location of its original London factory. Altria Group, Inc. NYSE: MO (previously named Philip Morris Companies Inc.), based in New York City, is one of the world's largest food, beverage, and tobacco corporations and a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500. It owns the brands Marlboro under its Philip Morris USA arm and retains a majority stake in Kraft Foods and a 36% interest in SABMiller, parent company of Miller Brewing.Altria's tobacco subsidiary, Philip Morris, is the world's largest commercial tobacco company by sales. (The China National Tobacco Co. and Japan Tobacco sell larger volumes.) Their flagship Marlboro is the world's most popular tobacco brand. Other popular tobacco brands owned by Phillip Morris are Parliament, Virginia Slims, and Benson and Hedges (in some markets only).Philip Morris was begun by a London tobacconist of the same name. He was one of the first people to sell hand-rolled cigarettes in the 1860s, selling them under the brand names Oxford and Cambridge Blues, following the adoption of cigarette smoking by British soldiers returning from the Crimean War. The company opened its New York office in 1902 and soon became part of James Duke's American Tobacco Company monopoly.Though Altria's headquarters are still in New York, in 2004 its Philip Morris USA division completed a move of its 682 New York based employees to Richmond, Virginia to consolidate operations and achieve cost savings for shareholders.Philip Morris bought Kraft Foods on October 30, 1988 for US$13.1 billion, in a bid to diversify from the declining tobacco business and to reduce litigation risk. It also purchased the Nabisco division of the former RJR Nabisco in 2000. On January 27, 2003, Philip Morris Companies Inc. changed its name to Altria Group Inc., to shed its image as merely a tobacco company.

 

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