Philip Morris in Ukraine has brought a new factory in Lviv region to its planned capacity, which was launched in May 2024, the company said in a press release.
“Since January this year, our factory has reached full capacity. This means that we can fully provide the Ukrainian market with our own products. Also at the beginning of 2025, we have fully completed the contract with a partner company in Ukraine, which has been producing products under our brands for more than two years. We are grateful to our colleagues for cooperation, because thanks to this partnership we were able to maintain production in Ukraine and continued to pay taxes here”, – commented Maxim Barabash, CEO of Philip Morris Ukraine.
The company reminded that Philip Morris (PMI) invested $30 mln in the launch of the Lviv factory, where five production lines are installed and put into operation. Their planned capacity is 10 billion cigarettes per year. The company has created 250 jobs, to which employees from the company’s Kharkiv facility have already been fully relocated.
According to Barabash, the company’s investments in Ukraine are not limited to the factory. In 2025, PMI plans to invest an additional 60 million UAH in a full-fledged large shelter on the territory of the factory, so that people could stay there in comfort and safety. Works on its arrangement have already started. The construction is planned to be completed by May 2025.
In addition, the company helped to modernize the existing shelter on the territory of Lviv city territorial community for about UAH 1.3 million.
Philip Morris was spun off from Altria in 2008 and is among the world’s largest tobacco manufacturers. The company’s 2023 revenue grew by 10.7% year-on-year to $35.2 billion in 2022. The report indicated that Ukraine accounted for about 2% of total sales in volume terms and 1% in cash terms.
PMI reduced shipments in the Ukrainian market by 30.1% to 11.07 billion cigarettes and tobacco sticks in 2022 due to the war, but it managed to increase finished goods shipments by 8.4% in 2023, including a 14.9% increase in the fourth quarter. The company reported in October 2023 that its share of the Ukrainian market had recovered to 24%. Ukraine figures were excluded from PMI’s quarterly reports in 2024.
In addition to cigarettes, PMI develops and manufactures smokeless products – electrically heated tobacco products (EHT), nicotine-containing PODs, and oral nicotine products. Sales from smokeless products accounted for 39% of PMI’s total net revenue in the first quarter of 2024 and 38% in the third quarter.
Philip Morris Ukraine has been operating in the Ukrainian market since 1994 and has invested more than $750 million in the Ukrainian economy since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, allocating more than UAH 400 million for humanitarian projects.
