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Yen’s Advance
Some board members said falling prices may damp long-term inflation expectations of companies and households, minutes of the bank’s Oct. 28 meeting showed this month. The yen’s advance lowers prices by making imports cheaper and that dynamic ”warrants caution,” Seiji Nakamura, a BOJ board member, said in a speech yesterday.[link widoczny dla zalogowanych].
Seiyu Ltd., a supermarket operator owned by U.S.-based Wal- Mart Stores Inc., this week began discounting 3,200 items including food, clothing and household goods by as much as 60 percent. Daiei Inc., another supermarket operator,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], is also cutting prices of household goods by as much as 25 percent.
A revision of the base year to calculate consumer prices scheduled for August 2011 will also likely lower Japanese price data. The last government revision pushed down prices by about 0.5 percentage point.
”Consumer price data will probably be depressed by the next year’s revision more than last time,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych],” BNP Paribas economists Ryutaro Kono and Azusa Kato wrote in a report. ”The BOJ’s exit from its virtual zero-rate policy seems considerably far away.”
For the first time, viable alternatives exist, said Jason Healy, who founded an electronic cigarette company called Blu Cigs in 2009 in response to what he said has been a movement to treat smokers like “lepers.”[link widoczny dla zalogowanych].
“Everyone’s been looking for the Holy Grail that allows you to smoke without everything that everyone’s concerned about,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych],” Healy said.
Big Tobacco has taken notice. Between 2006 and 2009, the country’s two largest tobacco companies by market share ― Altria Group and Reynolds American Inc. ― acquired smokeless tobacco companies that together give them about 90 percent of the U.S. market share in that category.
The tobacco companies have begun branding smokeless products with traditional cigarette brand names such as Marlboro and Camel to lure disenfranchised smokers.
“Use of a well-defined brand name is more likely to make a smoker consider trying a category they’ve never tried before,” said Maura Payne, spokeswoman for Reynolds American, which began testing in certain markets Camel brand tobacco products that dissolve like hard candy.
In 2009, Altria Group’s Marlboro Snus and Reynolds’ Camel Snus made the national scene. Snus comes in small tea-bag like sachets that are placed in the mouth but don’t need to be chewed for the user to absorb the nicotine. Snus is pasteurized and refrigerated instead of fermented,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], a process that significantly lowers the levels of carcinogens that lead to mouth cancers.[link widoczny dla zalogowanych].
The Snus market saw 28 percent year-over-year growth by volume in 2009, according to Euromonitor.