Factors driving cigarette aales in British American Tobacco Bangladesh

Abstract

British American Tobacco Bangladesh is a company that has been in the market of Bangladesh for more than 100 years and has been serving the consumers with their international quality product throughout this time. Even though the demand for tobacco products is very high in Bangladesh but due to its adverse health effects the tobacco industry is a very regulated industry in Bangladesh. The Tobacco Act undertaken by the Bangladesh Government puts a lot of restrictions on the activities of the tobacco companies starting from marketing of their products to very high taxation and excise duty charges. But having considered all those factors the revenue earned by the tobacco companies is still very high, last financial year BATB was the highest tax payer by paying a staggering amount of Tk 19,133 core taka in taxes. The aim of this study is to find out what are few of the factors that are driving the sale of cigarettes, by doing literature review on industry related articles and previous published papers I have narrowed down the factors to Price, Availability & Choices of Cigarettes. In addition, based on the literature review I constructed a questionnaire which was distributed via Google forms and 110 reposes were collected. Before the survey was conducted, I made three hypotheses based on the factors which represented each of the factors. The information collected was then interpreted using SPSS software and results were drawn. I conducted a descriptive analysis, factor analysis, reliability test and regression analysis on the data set. The results were then interpreted and conclusions were drawn from the results. Based on the coefficients table I found that the hypotheses related with price & availability being driving factors for sale of cigarettes were true as the beta value was positive and the T statistic showed a significance below 0.05. On the other hand, the hypothesis related with the third factor that is wide array of choices was proves wrong which means, a wider choice of cigarettes does not lead to an increase in the sale of the cigarettes.