CIGARETTE manufacturer, Savanna Tobacco’s local market share has grown steadily over the years to reach 40% as the indigenous company strives for dominance, an official has said.
BY Fidelity Mhlanga
The company’s head of marketing Gerald Gumbo said the company’s studies revealed 1,2 billion sticks of cigarettes were being consumed in Zimbabwe, with 80% of the total output being exported.
“Our market share, ranges between 20-40%. When we started our market share was a single digit and our brands grew during the hyperinflation era when our competitors stopped production. We never stopped production,” he said.
Gumbo said the South African market was huge, absorbing between 10 to 15 times more cigarettes than Zimbabwe.
Zimbabwe also exports to Cyprus, Zambia, Angola and is currently accessing other export markets as it leverages its footprints in Africa and beyond.
By 2014 the company had invested $5 million in new equipment that packs cigarettes into small packs of two, five and ten units in line with falling consumer spending power.
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Savanna Tobacco recently rebranded its Pacific Storm in a bid to boost consumption at a time the country is experiencing low consumer demand exacerbated by a harsh economic environment that is characterised by tight liquidity.
“This is just the mordenisation of the brand to widen the target market of the flagship brand of Savanna. Our product, our packaging, our price is the best in the market. With this in mind, the customers have the reason to stick to our products,” the company’s brand executive Rubatsiro Kadzunge said.
Going forward, Kadzunge said, the rebranding exercise will spread to other products in order to grow market share. She said her company has adequate capacity to meet demand.
Formed in 2002, Savanna Tobacco purchased the Harare Threshing Plant, reconditioned its machinery and started processing and packaging cigarette brands — Pacific, Pegasus and Branson — and selling them to a number of cigarette factories around the world.
In 2015 Savanna Tobacco rolled out the Micro-Entrepreneurs Empowerment Programme, which identifies and capacitates over 3 000 small business-people with distribution facilities, product lines and support networks.
