Good morning, everyone, and Welcome to the BAT 2026 Capital Markets Day. I am Victoria Buxton, Group Head of Investor Relations. I am delighted that so many of you are joining us here today, both in person and online. Thank you for taking the time to hear more about BAT's transformation. Before we start, I would like to draw your attention to the following cautionary statements, which apply throughout the day. Unless otherwise stated, our comments will focus on constant currency-adjusted measures, which include adjustments related to profit from our Canadian combustibles business. Average year-to-date share data is to July 2026 versus full year 2025 average. We are not expecting any fire alarms today, so if you hear one, please exit via the doors at the back or front of the room and make your way downstairs to exit the building the same way that you came in.
BAT's sustainable transformation continues to gain momentum. Over the next two days, we will share our vision for the future of BAT and demonstrate why we believe BAT is best positioned to win in the growing global nicotine industry, powered by our world-class capabilities, leading brands, broad footprint, and exceptional people. We will start the presentation shortly. At 12:00 P.M., those of you attending in person will join interactive exhibitions while the webcast will be paused. On the back of your badges, you will see key event times, as well as two labels, as shown in the example on screen. Your day one label indicates which group you are in today for our innovation, digital, and trade marketing interactive exhibitions. I will return later to share more detail on these. Your day two label indicates your group for our Reynolds Operation Center site visit tomorrow.
In addition, at the end of the coffee and lunch breaks, you will hear a bell or a chime. Please take this as a signal to return to the auditorium. I am now delighted to hand over to David Waterfield, President of Reynolds American. David has led and grown some of the group's most successful businesses around the world, and most recently, has led our turnaround in the U.S. David, over to you.
Thank you, Victoria. Good morning, everyone, and Welcome to Capital Markets Day in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. It is a privilege to host you at the home of Reynolds American, in the city we have called home since our founding in 1875. Let me begin with the significance of where we are meeting today. Winston-Salem is a city shaped by reinvention. Its economy has evolved from its traditional industrial roots into a more diverse center for advanced manufacturing, healthcare, biotechnology, financial services, and research. Today, the city is home to approximately a quarter of a million people and anchors the broader Piedmont Triad region, which has over 1.7 million people. Its universities and colleges provide an important foundation for talent, connecting education and commercial enterprise with the needs of a changing economy.
Reynolds has been part of this community story for more than 150 years, and as Winston-Salem has grown and evolved, so have we. That makes Winston-Salem a particularly fitting place for today's conversation. Since 1875, Reynolds has helped shape this community through investment, employment, innovation, and long-term civic partnership. We are proud of that history, but our focus is firmly on what comes next. From this foundation, Reynolds is transforming and investing to deliver sustainable growth in the next era of the U.S. nicotine market. We are pleased to have you with us and look forward to sharing more about our business, our people, and the opportunity ahead for BAT. I will now hand over to our Chief Executive, Tadeu Marroco. Thank you.
The world is changing faster than ever. Consumer expectations evolve. Technology accelerates. Entire industries are being reshaped. Right now, leadership belongs to those who anticipate change, transforming with confidence, executing on a global scale. Nicotine value is growing, an industry in which BAT has built a global multi-category portfolio of leading brands, industry-leading digital and AI-powered execution, deep consumer insights, world-class science and stewardship, a connected R&D ecosystem, a front-footed approach to shaping regulation, and unparalleled global distribution and retail reach. Taken together, these create powerful competitive advantages, driving our multi-category portfolio of leading brands. Helping BAT win today. Increasing momentum towards A Better Tomorrow. Combustibles is our powerhouse, delivering value at scale, fueling our transformation. In parallel, our consumer-led new category business is thriving, becoming an increasingly meaningful contributor to our group performance.
BAT is committed to driving quality growth, creating sustainable long-term value, and accelerating our journey toward a predominantly smokeless future. We are building momentum as we transform, and as we transform, so our momentum builds. Today, we invite you to look beyond the horizon to explore what is possible, the capabilities, the people, the belief, and the ambitions that are driving BAT's future.
Thank you, David. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. It is a pleasure to be here in Winston-Salem, home of Reynolds American, at the BAT Capital Markets Day. I will share the exciting opportunity ahead for BAT, the pathway to Horizon 2030. I am joined by our management board and other senior leaders. There will be many opportunities to engage with us all directly. As we continue to transform, so too does BAT leadership. So I am especially pleased to welcome Dragos, who returned to BAT as our new CFO, and Celina, who will lead our APMEA region. So I believe BAT is uniquely positioned to win, not just because our industry is growing in value. Our multi-category portfolio, global footprint, people culture, and hard-to-replicate capabilities, together with our best-in-class regional execution, will drive sustainable value at scale.
Let me open with five key messages that frame the next two days. First, the momentum is real. New category revenue was up 18% in H1, whilst total revenue was up 8.5% in the U.S., the world's largest nicotine value pool. That is delivered, not ambition. Second, my belief is that the industry has a long runway of profitable growth ahead. Third, the new categories, and modern oral in particular, are where the industry is growing. We hold strong positions in each of them, especially as the clear global leader in modern oral. Fourth, we are both performing and transforming at the same time, building capabilities that make us future fit. We are not trading one for the order. Fifth, the pathway to our 2030 algorithm is clear and aligned to investor expectations. We are delivering against the ambitions we have set out.
Today, we will demonstrate how we plan to win over Horizon 2030. At our Capital Markets Day in 2024, I made five commitments, and I would like to review our progress against each of them. First, we said we would become increasingly profitable in new categories. Between 2023 and 2025, we delivered an incremental GBP 450 million in new category contribution, led by modern oral and vapor. In H1 2026, new category revenue was up 18%, with category contribution up 55%. That is profitable growth, not growth at any cost. Second, we said we would turn around the U.S. In H1 2026, U.S. revenue was up over 80%, adjusted profit up 10%, with new category revenue up 60%. The U.S. is back to growth, and it's quality growth with top and bottom-line delivery. The U.S.
is the cornerstone of the BAT business, and today, you will experience firsthand the strength of our Reynolds organization. Third, we said a multi-category strategy would win with consumers. We are growing across new categories with leading positions in modern oral and vapor, and this portfolio gives us optionality as consumer preference shifts, recognizing both markets and consumers differ. Fourth, we lay out how credible science can underpin regulatory direction. Regulators around the world are starting to grasp tobacco harm reduction. That shift is opening up categories and new markets. Fifth, we said we would deliver our financial algorithm. H1 2026 adjusted diluted EPS growth is within our five to eight algorithm, with revenue, profitability, and cash all moving in the right direction. We set out what we would do, and we are doing it. Our recipe for success is simple.
Prioritize what matters, focus on the most attractive value pools, execute with discipline, build great teams, and consistently deliver on our commitments. We are delivering today and investing in a better tomorrow. The nicotine industry is transforming and growing. In our addressable markets, we expect the total legal industry revenue to grow at around a 4% CAGR between 2025 and 2030. This revenue will be driven by double-digit growth in new categories, underpinned by resilient low-single-digit growth in combustibles. Within new categories, modern oral is the fastest-growing category by far, a category in which we are global leaders. We expect the modern oral industry revenue to almost triple by 2030. Smokers are increasingly switching to new categories, and this is offsetting volume decline in combustibles as smokers look for smokeless alternatives.
We are committed to actively encouraging adult smokers who would otherwise choose to continue to smoke, to make a full switch to smokeless alternatives, underpinning our 2035 predominantly smokeless ambition. During that switching process, our insights show consumers using multiple nicotine products or poly-using. We also see a growing preference for no inhalation products. Indeed, modern oral is expected to grow double digits on a compound basis, reaching a number similar to heated product consumers by 2030. For many smokers, poly-use is a transitional period on the way to a complete switch to smokeless. Part of any transformation is also transition. While adult smokers who choose to continue using nicotine should switch completely without delay, poly-usage is a reality of the industry's transformation. Over the last five years, total poly-use has doubled, mostly driven by poly-use within new categories, and we expect this trend to continue.
A Better Tomorrow is not new. The fundamental direction of the BAT strategy is not changing. That strategy rests on three core elements of our strategic arrowhead: quality growth, a dynamic business, and a sustainable future. What has evolved is the context, how markets, consumers, and regulation have developed. The strategy is delivering, and the switch to smokeless is accelerating. The question is not whether that direction is right. It's a question of how we build on it and the question of strategic execution. Today is all about BAT's Horizon 2030. Under quality growth, we will explore the U.S. as a cornerstone, as our growth driver, a sharper expression of our inhalation portfolio, and optionality beyond nicotine. Then to tobacco harm reduction and our world-class capabilities. Each of these has a session in the agenda, so I will leave the detail to the team.
The point here is that the agenda maps to the strategy. Let me show you how these seven building blocks come together. The U.S. is our growth cornerstone. It is the world's largest nicotine value pool. Two years ago, it was our biggest question mark. Today, it's our proof point. We will continue to lead and accelerate modern oral through category adoption, premium differentiation, and broader flavors and formats. Modern oral is and will be our clear driver in our smokeless journey. In combustibles, we are investing to strengthen our portfolio for those who choose to continue to smoke through portfolio laddering and digitally enhanced revenue growth management. In vapor, our portfolio will increasingly shift to premium and ensure we are well-placed to capture more poly-users interacting between new category inhalation space. In heated products, we are making selective investments choice with glo, Hilo, and Hyper.
As more consumers are poly-using within the smokeless inhalation space, we will broaden our approach to this reality with a more selective return of investment mindset, deploying new innovations in the frontier between vapor and heated, as Anniek will present later. Beyond nicotine, we also be an important part of the future. While currently small, we are strategically focused on well-being stimulation cannabis. We will also highlight two critical enablers, tobacco harm reduction understanding and its impact on the regulatory environment, led by world-class science and evidence-based policy. Finally, our capabilities. Distribution scale and retail reach, invest in the technology of the future, winning with the best talent, and a leaner, more empowered organization. These are all BAT's growth drivers. Importantly, these are not seven separate independent plans. They are managed cohesively. Altogether, they will deliver the 2030 algorithm. They're whole greater than the sum of the parts.
As Julian will demonstrate, at BAT, we begin with the consumer. Turning our insights into growth is through innovation, demanding that we understand consumers better than anyone else. Increasingly, we are tech-enabling our insights with digital listening and AI. This feeds innovation, leveraging our unique R&D ecosystem, leading to a pipeline of differentiated products. And we then execute at scale with our world-class manufacturing footprint and regional execution through our global reach. Turn to the U.S., our largest region, where we are the fastest-growing company in total nicotine.
60 million adult nicotine consumers, a GBP 42 billion revenue pool, and one-third of the global nicotine value projected to keep growing through 2030. Modern oral is the fastest-growing category in the market. In H1 2026, our volume and revenue were up around 200%. Volume share is now over 30%, with Velo capturing around 80% of industry growth. Our success demonstrates our executional excellence.
Within 18 months of launch, we had built local manufacturing, reached over 90% weighted distribution, and Velo+ became America's number two brand. Velo Max, we will bring incremental flavors and nicotine levels. In vapor, enforcement is starting to yield results. Vuse is performing strongly, with revenue up nearly 20% at H1 of this year, and value share close to 57% year-to-date. Furthermore, we have recently launched a range of Vuse flavors in a responsible manner. And in combustibles, we are strengthening our portfolio to align with recent category dynamics through a strategically laddered portfolio, strong brands, and sharper revenue growth management. In 2024, the turnaround story was only a plan. Now it is in the numbers. David will talk more about the U.S. opportunity this afternoon. However, our ambition is clear. Win in the world's largest nicotine value pool with our exceptional portfolio and proven executional capabilities.
The global opportunity for modern oral is exciting. Velo is the fastest-growing brand in the fastest-growing new category. In Q4 last year, we achieved the global volume share leadership, and Velo is global number one in both equity and consumer satisfaction. Consumers, volume, and revenue have all tripled in three years, with industry revenue expected to triple again by 2030, and Velo is expected to outperform this. Looking ahead, our ambition is to strengthen that leadership, and here are the reasons to believe. In Europe, we are the clear leader. We are nearly seven times the volume share and 10 times the value share of our nearest competitor. We earned that through a combination of product, brand, and execution. Superior pouch comfort, smoother nicotine delivery, and a broader range of flavors and formats. And the economic follows, with gross profit per unit around four times combustibles.
Fred will focus on that in AME performance later. Regulators are also starting to recognize the category's public health potential, reinforcing value sustainability. And going forward, our priorities are clear. First, category growth. Today, global incidence remains low, and average daily consumption in a mature market like Sweden, at 12 pouches per day, is three times higher than the global average at four. Second, we will build Velo as the modern oral reference. Adult flavors, formats, product innovation, and an ever-stronger brand expression. These priorities will sustain our momentum through to 2030. In summary, brand building, distribution, and innovation are capabilities that will drive competitive advantage. In the near term, there will, of course, be a cost of entry into newer markets. That said, we model profitability reaching levels higher than our traditional business over time. Winning combustibles is critical and will help enable our transformation.
It is a GBP 63 billion industry with around 1 billion adult smokers globally, and remains a highly profitable value pool, one where we are number 1 in revenue across our 140 markets. Indeed, we are number one or two in 25 of our top 40 markets. Notably, the consumer environment continues to evolve. In response, we have deployed a laddered portfolio across price tiers, alongside digitally enhanced revenue growth management tools. We will focus on four combustible priorities. First, being choiceful. Concentrate on 20 key markets that represent 80% of industry revenue. Fewer priorities, better executed. In the U.S., we are investing in and extending our portfolio through new product launches and laddering, extending trade coverage, and strengthening our adult nicotine consumer digital database. Secondly, we keep adapting our global portfolio through innovation, new product introductions, and refreshed blends and packaging.
Thirdly, we are leveraging our scale through more than 11 million retail outlets, 150 million daily consumer touch points, and an integrated global supply chain. Fourthly, we have a sharp eye on productivity with a strong track record of savings delivery, and I am confident our future plans will also deliver. Turning now to vapor. Vapor is the largest new category by total consumer numbers and is a significant contributor to our revenue at GBP 1.5 billion in 2025. Vuse is the largest legal brand globally and continues to strengthen with over 44% value share in top markets, up 1.1 percentage points year to date. I want to be open about the regulatory picture because it matters. The category's full potential has been constrained by poor regulation and weak enforcement. Disappointingly, it is not a level playing field. Regulation is an important input in selecting our priorities.
That said, we are seeing early signs of progress in key markets, such as here in the U.S., where we estimate the total illicit value pool is around GBP 7 billion. Our base case assumes 30% of illicit market value returns to the legal market by 2030. This represents at around GBP 2 billion white space opportunity, a potentially important driver of sustainable growth. We see premium vapor done right as an attractive and untapped segment for further value creation. Our latest innovation, Vuse Ultra, in our most advanced product yet. Rolling out in 2025, focused on the largest profit pools, we have achieved meaningful value share gains in strategic markets. Going forward, we will continue to focus on the U.S. as the market leader and to develop Vuse in premium globally while advocating for regulation and enforcement.
Let me turn to heated products focused on the largest and most attractive profit pools. This is an estimated GBP 9 billion category, growing high single digits annually, with around 80% of the value concentrated in the premium segment. With over 13% volume share in our top heated markets, we have a competitive foundation. However, this is a highly contested category with high cost of growth. Our focus is on two things. Our hypercore protects our scale and revenue and will participate tactically in the value segment as this supports consumer inflow into the category. The second is premium, where we are establishing our position with glo Hilo. Innovation improvement is measured. Consumer perception is 10%-15% points ahead of our previous scores.
While early days, our premium share is already 80% in key launch market Poland, with most of this inflow new to glo, coming from premium combustibles and the broader heated category. Looking forward, we will approach this category with our current competitive platforms and broaden vapor offers to current heated users, who represent an attractive cohort of consumers increasingly poly- using across the inhalation space. We will remain target in our rollout approach with a clear focus on reducing category losses from 2027 onwards. Lastly, a word on beyond nicotine. While our approach is measured, the opportunity ahead is real. We take confidence from the capabilities we already have in place across science, R&D, supply chain, consumer insights, and our global reach. Alongside wellbeing stimulation, we have patiently built an early-stage ecosystem in cannabis, providing optionality over time as the regulatory landscape evolves.
Today, this is a small business, and it's not in our 2030 algorithm. It's an option we are building choicefully. James will talk more about this beyond 2030 growth engine later. Turning to tobacco harm reduction and regulation. We have decades of experience operating in complex regulatory environments. Although the regulatory environment is moving in the right direction, it's not fast enough. 70 of our top 80 markets permit at least one new category. Modern oral regulation has expanded from four markets in 2023 to over 30 markets today. In the U.S., the FDA pathway enables appropriate flavors and nicotine strengths in both vapor and modern oral. That progress is not accidental. It rests on science, advocacy, and engagement. Yet, the science only matters if it shapes better understanding, and that's why we built Omni, our go-to authority on tobacco harm reduction.
Omni has been a centerpiece of my commitment to be more front-footed corporate affairs, which Kingsley will talk more in more detail later on. While I'm encouraged by the recent progress, particularly in the U.S., more needs to be done, and we have the scale, experience, and patience to succeed. The key point here is this. Better regulation is not simply a matter of principle. It creates a more sustainable business, and it is a clear unlock for long-term value creation. Let me briefly touch on capability development, starting with our data foundation. Through strategic partnerships, we are embedding a next-generation data foundation with AI, a core operating capability. We have around 1,000 AI agents in daily active use. Today, every BAT employee who has a computer has access to AI, and is being trained to use it. Our ambition here is simple.
More embedded intelligence into everyday decision, every day. Javed will talk more about our progress next. Distribution scale and retail reach for us is a genuine structural advantage, and is roughly double that of other large cap consumer companies. Behind this sits an integrated operations network, both resilient and agile. 45 manufacturing sites, 15 of them multi-category, 34,000 suppliers, and over 100 innovation partners, which Zafar will talk more about. BAT has also become a leaner company. Our Fit2Win program is making us smarter and faster. Beyond delivering an expected GBP 700 million in benefits by 2028, we are creating fastest planning cycles and a simpler organization with clear accountabilities. Of course, none of this works without people. We continue to attract, upskill, and retain top talent. Capability lives in the organization itself, not in the technology.
As we transform, our employer value proposition is strengthening, allowing us to attract a broader talent base. There have also been noticeable changes in leadership roles. Since becoming CEO, around 60% of my direct reports are either new to BAT, new to the management board, or new in role. It's the fusion of external and internal talent, experiences, and skills that makes a winning team, and I'm proud to lead a winning team. Let me bring all of that back to one page. Seven strategic levers and one growth agenda. Driving U.S. multi-category growth to continue to deliver in the world's largest nicotine value pool. Prioritizing resource behind our global leadership position in modern oral. Accelerating category growth and ensuring Velo as the fastest-growing brand in the fastest-growing category. Continue to invest in our combustibles business, strengthening our global portfolio to drive sustainable future.
Focus selectively on new category inhalation with more premium innovation, and carefully developing beyond nicotine optionality. All of this underpinned by consumer-relevant innovation, our tobacco harm reduction agenda, and building world-class capabilities. These are not seven separate initiatives. Instead, they come together to compound our strategic execution capability. These are the building blocks that will deliver Horizon 2030. Finally, to the algorithm. Our guidance targets sustainable growth of 3%-5% revenue, 4%-6% adjusted profit, and 5%-8% adjusted diluted earnings. Furthermore, we expect to generate more than GBP 50 billion of free cash flow between 2024 and 2030. Our pathway to deliver is clear. Revenue performance comes from our growth engines. 1%-2% from combustibles through pricing, portfolio mix. Mid-teens growth in new categories with target investments where the value pool sits, driving at least a 30% new category contribution margin by 2030.
That is quality growth, not volume for its own sake. Group profitability will also benefit from a genuine step-up in efficiency. GBP 2 billion of productivity savings between 2026 and 2030, and GBP 700 million of annualized Fit2Win benefits by 2028. Kickers will support earnings, including further share buybacks and reduced finance costs over time as leverage hits the 2x-2.5 x corridor. Two years ago, back in 2024, I set out five commitments. Today, I have outlined our delivery against each of them. As we map out our Horizon 2030 ambitions, I would ask you to judge it against that track record. Delivering today, investing in A Better Tomorrow. Just before I hand over to Javed, I would like to thank him. Javed served as our interim CFO for the past year. He made an outstanding contribution to this important stage of our journey.
On behalf of the board and myself, I would like to thank him for his leadership and highly valued contribution. Thank you, Javed, and over to you. Thank you.
Thank you, Tadeu, and good morning, everyone. My name is Javed Iqbal. I am Director of Digital and Information at BAT, and I will now take you through our changing digital landscape. Digital and AI are now embedded as an integral part of transformation of BAT, fully sponsored by our CEO and supported by the management team, and already playing a pivotal role in creating opportunities for top-line growth and productivity right across our organization. You will see this all throughout the day in all the presentations. Let us start with our strategic ambition. A Better Tomorrow built on three pillars, quality growth, sustainable future, and dynamic business. Digital and AI no longer sit alongside these pillars. They are integrated into every one of them. In quality growth, AI is accelerating innovation and powering our marketing. In dynamic business, ChatBAT is transforming how our people work every day.
In sustainable future, we are digitalizing agriculture and compliance to make our supply chain smarter and leaner. All driving growth, productivity, and competitive advantage across BAT and fueling our transformation into a Better Tomorrow. Today, I would like to focus on the first two pillars. None of this ambition happens alone. It is built on a deep, trusted partnership, and none more strategic to us than our partnership with Microsoft. To bring that partnership to life, I would like to hand over to Judson Althoff, CEO of Microsoft Commercial Business, who joins us with a short message on how far we have come together.
Hi, everyone. I am Judson Althoff, CEO of Microsoft's Commercial Business. I would like to thank Tadeu and BAT's management board for inviting me to join you today to share a few words about our partnership. Microsoft and BAT's longstanding relationship is built on trust, innovation, and shared ambition. A year ago, our boards met to craft the vision for BAT's frontier firm journey. Today, it is exciting to see the momentum as that vision translates to real transformation. From the rollout of Microsoft 365 Copilot to enrich employee experiences to democratizing data across the business with Microsoft Fabric, BAT is embedding AI throughout the workforce to unlock insights, accelerate decision-making, and deliver real business outcomes.
BAT is also building their own AI solutions like ChatBAT, developed on Microsoft Foundry, that harnesses the company's unique intelligence and expertise to deliver differentiated capability at enterprise scale and better serve millions of customers around the world. At Microsoft, we believe AI reaches its full potential when it amplifies human ambition.
Frontier transformation is more than just deploying AI. It is about building an intelligence foundation rooted in trust where knowledge compounds, expertise scales, and people can focus on what matters most. As one of our most strategic global customers and partners, I am thrilled to see BAT leading the way with AI and agentic capabilities to fundamentally redefine how work gets done. We are honored to be a trusted partner as BAT continues to innovate in the era of AI, and I am proud of the work that we have delivered together. I look forward to what is ahead. Thank you.
Thank you, Judson. That is the perspective of one of the global digital leaders shaping the future of artificial intelligence. The question for BAT is not whether this transformation will happen, but how we harness it to create a competitive advantage, unlock productivity, and accelerate growth. That is the story I would like to share with you today. The key point is, none of this is possible without the right foundations. AI at scale demands a modern, cloud-first, data-driven core, and that is exactly what we have spent last few years building. Thanks to our strategic partnerships, BAT is ahead of the curve. Let me share four key highlights. First, we streamlined our strategic technology partnerships, reducing IT run cost by 40% while maintaining 99.9% uptime. Second, we are a global leader in cloud adoption with 85% cloud hosting through strategic partnerships with Microsoft, SAP, and AWS.
Gartner Research Board membership survey of 58 plus CIOs indicate that 80% of enterprise workload will be cloud-hosted by 2027. BAT reached 85% cloud hosting in 2025, placing us ahead of the curve and enabling faster innovation and scalable digital capabilities. Third, our pioneering partnership with Microsoft enabled the rapid build of our enterprise data platform, advancing our global data infrastructure through Microsoft Fabric and next-gen technologies. This empowers our data-first agile organization, enhancing tools like RGM and marketing spend effectiveness. Finally, we launched our GenAI lab in Dubai in 2025, making BAT the first CPG company in the region's AI hub, which has enabled deployment of use cases like Ask Omni, AI-powered sustainability bots, and advanced consumer insight tools. This leads me to a critical point this transformation generally require, substantial incremental investment.
Based on Gartner consumer product industry median is 8% of transformation investment for a leading CPG organization. However, in BAT's case, over the last five years, we have systematically optimized traditional technology spend and redirected those savings into transformation, mainly focusing in data analytics, AI, employee experience, and compliance. As a result, investment in transformational initiatives has more than doubled from 11% to 23%, with minimal increase in total IT spend. This shift is enabling us to accelerate AI, digital workplace capabilities, and data-driven innovation while maintaining a sustainable cost base. With the foundations and right investments in place, we are ready for our next chapter at BAT. Our ambition is to be recognized as the AI leader in the CPG industry. But our focus is not AI for AI's sake. AI must create measurable business value at scale. Every investment is evaluated through a commercial lens.
We prioritize use cases that drive growth, improve productivity, enhance decision-making, or reduce costs. If a use case cannot demonstrate a clear value, it is not a priority. Our approach is simple: disrupt, adopt, and scale. We identify opportunities where AI can transform how we operate, adopt proven solutions quickly, and scale them to drive value. Our approach is built on three principles: commercially focused, cost-conscious, and value-driven. Success is not measured by the amount of AI we deploy, but by the business outcomes we deliver. Together with this approach and principles, we ensure that AI become not just a technology capability, but a catalyst for BAT's transformation. Let me show you what that looks like in practice. Bringing our value-driven approach to life, starting with our most powerful AI capability in R&D, and my favorite, too.
The next video demonstrates how we are augmenting our scientists with AI, not simply to do things faster, but to unlock better outcomes and support our smokeless transformation.
Where does sensation begin? With a spark of flavor? A moment of satisfaction? The origin of every product story. Sensation isn't a coincidence. It is chemistry, precision, and decades of science interacting with the human mind in a single instant. And now we are not just mastering that instant, we are multiplying it. How? By digitalizing sensory science itself. Powering our products is a suite of proprietary machine learning models built from the ground up by BAT's data scientists and integrated with our ChatBAT generative AI multi-agentic ecosystem. Meet Vega, running complex simulations in 30 minutes that previously took up to three months. BlendAI, predicting precise taste profiles before a single leaf is even blended. VSense, mapping intricate sensations across hundreds of thousands of individual ingredients. Digital Chemosensory, decoding flavor architecture at the molecular level. With success rates more than doubled, our prototyping capacity now has no limits.
A single tool accelerates a task, but a transformative program accelerates the entire enterprise. Across R&D, we didn't build pilots, we built a pipeline. Over 20 AI initiatives, each strategic end-to-end and moving through a rigorous, disciplined path. Every sprint puts a new prototype in front of real users. Every month pushes another agent into production. Our teams are testing, deploying, and transforming today. After our discovery, it is important to keep it protected. Our patents researcher AI analyzes millions of filings, multiplying our invention discovery capacity by 10. Faster access to global intelligence means our scientists spend less time searching and more time inventing. This is discovery, expanded, protected, and accelerated, realizing our vision with ultimate clarity and confidence. This is the future of our R&D, all powered by ChatBAT generative AI multi-agentic ecosystem.
There are three key points I want to leave with you on innovation. First, speed. AI intelligence enhances formulation design, reducing work that previously took three months to around 30 minutes. Second, effectiveness. AI-supported product development doubles the success rate, enabling us to identify stronger solution earlier in the process. Third, productivity. Our AI patent researcher reduces search time by more than 90%, allowing our scientists to focus more of their time on discovery and innovation. Together, these capabilities reduce time to market, increase success rate, and unlock R&D productivity. This is precisely what we mean by value-driven AI, applying technology where it can deliver clear commercial impact and drive quality growth. And you will hear more about this from Zafar on our R&D AI capabilities. Having seen how AI is accelerating innovation in R&D, let's now move to another critical growth engine for BAT, our commercial and marketing capabilities.
Our focus spans across marketing from understanding consumers, to enabling our trade teams, to creating content at scale. First, synthetic consumer AI segments give us richer consumer insights and a deeper understanding of preferences, behaviors, and trends. In the next presentation, Julian will talk about this new exciting capability, which help us improve targets and develop consumer-relevant offers as we do this by leveraging our years of research data now harnessed by the power of AI.
What if you could understand how your consumers are likely to think before making a decision? Powered by AI. Meet the future of our insights team. We are bringing the consumer into the very moment of decision through AI. By interacting with AI-powered synthetic personas, our teams can explore behaviors, validate ideas, and uncover new opportunities in real time. By combining years of offline research with AI, the synthetic consumer's agent turns understanding into an interactive, continuous conversation, delivering meaningful insights at the exact speed of business. This is not just research redesigned. This is consumer understanding reimagined.
Let's look into our second use case, AI-enabled trade assistant. At BAT, strategy is ultimately delivered at the point of execution, in store, in front of the customer. Within the limited time our field teams have to make the right decision, this is where we leverage AI to help drive quality growth. We augment our field force. With AI intelligence, it helps them to plan their day with the highlights of key stores to be visited and recommendation of actions they should take. It also amplifies the visit by deep diving into data to provide insights that turn into actions. We are testing this exciting capability in Canada and plan to scale it into other markets soon. The result is more time with customers, more consistent execution across territories, and better relationship with our partners.
This is how AI become a productivity engine in trade and productivity becomes a platform for growth. Lastly, we are transforming content creation through AI, enabling us to create once and scale to adopt everywhere, significantly reducing time to market while improving efficiency and effectiveness. As an example, leveraging AI in content for our McLaren social media activation has enabled 90% reduction in agency hours, plus 180% market participation with seven times more assets production per race and eight times faster content turnaround. Here again, there are three key takeaways I want to leave with you on AI-powered marketing. First, speed. We can reduce concept testing from four weeks to just one day, which allows our teams to make faster insight-led decisions while retaining final validation with real consumers. Second, effectiveness. Our AI trade assistant provide richer customer insights, enabling more meaningful engagement and higher quality commercial conversation.
Third, scale. Generative AI enables us to create seven times more content while reducing agency effort by up to 90%, significantly increasing marketing productivity. Together, these capabilities help us understand consumer faster, engage customers more effectively, and scale content creation efficiently. This is value-driven AI delivering tangible commercial impact. So far, you have seen how AI is helping us to create value in R&D and marketing. Our ambition goes beyond specific functions. We are using AI to empower and reskill our employees through ChatBAT, transforming BAT's workforce and adopting AI at scale.
Introducing ChatBAT, BAT's single front door to enterprise AI, uniting AI assistants, agents, comprehensive training, and enterprise-grade governance into one seamless ecosystem. ChatBAT empowers our people to work smarter, decide better, and move faster.
ChatBAT is a lot more than just a single tool. To start off with, we are rolling out Copilot across the entire organization. This is not just any version of Copilot. BAT's frontier version of Copilot lets you choose between ChatGPT models and Claude models, while also including powerful new features such as Microsoft Copilot.
We can discover everything AI in BAT. We learn how to use AI for us, and we will have the opportunity to build AI for personal use cases, but way beyond as well, even at enterprise scale.
ChatBAT, an enterprise AI ecosystem empowering every employee to access AI, learn AI, and build AI-powered solutions that drive productivity, insight, and growth at scale.
ChatBAT is our enterprise-wide AI ecosystem designed to help every employee embrace AI in a secure and responsible way. It brings together the capabilities needed to embed AI across all levels of the organization. At its foundation, ChatBAT is powered by the rollout of Microsoft's frontier version of Copilot, bringing AI assistants into daily workflows. On top of that, we are investing in enterprise-wide AI training as dedicated AI super users program and vibrant AI communities that help share knowledge and accelerate adoption. ChatBAT also includes an agentic AI platform providing the enterprise backbone to govern AI agents across BAT. This ensures innovation can move quickly while remaining secure and reusable. Across the business, most importantly, it is about AI inclusion. Our ambition is to make AI accessible to everyone, ensuring every employee can benefit from greater productivity, better insights, and faster decision-making.
Every employee has the opportunity to learn and reskill at their own pace. The real power of ChatBAT is not the technology itself. It is what happens when thousands of colleagues across BAT use AI every day to work smarter, move faster, and create more value. That is why our focus has been as much on people as it has been on platform. We have invested heavily in capability building to ensure AI becomes part of how BAT works every day. The results have been exceptional. ChatBAT recorded over 140,000 visits on day one. We have already seen more than 10,000+ training registration, making this the fastest adoption of any training program in BAT's history. Pushing us to work with Microsoft to increase our training capacity per session from 100 users to 1,000 users per session.
We complemented this with our AI super user program, where we plan that by end of this year, 150 colleagues have undertaken advanced AI learning, representing more than 9,000 hours of capability building. Most importantly, this learning is translating into action. We already have a significant number of AI agents embedded across business functions. Looking ahead, our ambition is even greater. To double adoption in 2027, maintain 80% daily active usage, more than 1,000 active agents across the organization. This is how we create a truly dynamic business. Not by deploying AI to select few, but by upskilling every team member with tools and confidence to use AI every day. Everything I have shown so far is delivering value today. We are equally excited about what comes next.
As we look ahead, our focus on investments on high impact opportunities where AI can fundamentally transform core business processes and create sustainable competitive advantage. Four strategic priorities stand out. First, applying AI to cost of goods sold optimization. BAT will have one integrated view of every factory, every category, and every product real time. So we drive productivity and efficiency, maximizing profitability on every unit we manufacture. Second, further accelerating R&D through AI. Third, embedding AI into integrated business planning and management, enabling faster decisions, stronger governance, and more proactive risk management. Last, in the U.S., Reynolds is integrating finance and commercial data into an AI-enabled performance platform. This will automate reporting and deliver predictive insights for faster and smarter decision-making.
While we focus on delivering value across the functions, we are also enhancing resilience in our cybersecurity measures to deal with the heightened external threats due to AI. Just as an example, we are testing new AI capabilities with Microsoft that enables automated detection, prioritization, and remediation of security threats proactively. These are not incremental improvements. These projects represent a step change to reimagine our most critical business processes with the help of AI. As I said in the opening, scaling AI requires strong strategic partnerships. Let's now hear from Julie Sweet, CEO of Accenture and our strategic digital partner, on how BAT is turning AI ambition into enterprise-wide impact.
Hello, I'm Julie Sweet, Chair and CEO of Accenture. Thank you, Tadeu and Javed, for inviting me to be part of your Capital Markets Day. We are privileged to work with BAT as your strategic partner on your reinvention with AI. Your leadership team has embraced the hard work of transformation, reimagining what's possible for a company with a century of history. By focusing on two fundamentals of reinvention, you are on track to see results. The first is using AI to solve your biggest business challenges. Instead of just automating old ways of working, you are using AI models and virtual experience to speed up time to market of new products. AI is helping to drive down the cost of goods, optimize marketing, and intuitively connect critical parts of your business so leaders can make better decisions faster.
The second fundamental is that you are rethinking every part of the enterprise to get the most from AI. Together, we are strengthening BAT's digital core, the foundations of your reinvention with your SAP S/4HANA implementation and supply chain transformation. We created ChatBAT, a unique AI experience that helps all BAT employees put AI to work every day. We are also helping BAT leaders build the skills they need for an AI-powered future. A reinvention of this scale is only possible because our people are working side by side with yours to make every core function more efficient and effective. We are optimizing cost base, creating new value, and reinvesting in growth. I believe our partnership is a model for what reinvention requires. Working together across every area of BAT, laser-focused on getting you closer to becoming a majority smokeless business by 2035.
I wanted to thank you, Tadeu and Javed, and everyone at BAT, for this opportunity and for your collaboration, your leadership, and your conviction. Together, we have shown you are not waiting for the future, you are building it.
What resonated with me is the distinction between experimenting with AI and truly scaling it. As Julie highlighted, the opportunity is not simply deploying new tools, but fundamentally redesigning how work gets done across the enterprise. That is exactly the journey we are on at BAT. We have built the foundations, and we are reskilling our people, embedding AI into everyday work and applying it commercially focused opportunities across R&D, marketing, and our core business processes. Our ambition is clear: to become the leading AI-powered organization in CPG. We will achieve this by continuing to disrupt, adopt, and scale while remaining value-driven, cost-conscious, and commercially focused. For BAT, AI is not the destination. It is a catalyst for transformation and delivering A Better Tomorrow. Building on our 125 years of legacy, BAT is now writing the next chapter powered by AI.
Before I close, I would like to leave you with one final invitation. We will be hosting you in the Digital Innovation Room. My colleagues, Wilma, Ahu, Luis, and Irene, will be there to showcase some of our AI capabilities and answer questions you may have. Looking forward to seeing you there. With that, I will pass over to Julian, who will take you through the progress we have made in insights and foresights. Thank you. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Javed. Good morning, everyone. I am Julian Prynn, BAT's global Head of Consumer Insights and Foresights for the last three years. 29 years in the group in various roles and locations across regional, global, and end market level, including a period here in Reynolds, as well as marketing director out in the Middle East. At the last Capital Markets Day, we described the transformation we had made in modernizing consumer insights in BAT, becoming a driver of growth and innovation in our multi-category nicotine context. Our ability to increasingly understand complex behaviors, including the poly- usage of various products and categories in different consumption moments, is bringing real benefits as we turn this into action. We have been further augmenting and amplifying these capabilities through AI and other technology, giving us richer, faster, actionable insights that are deeply embedded in the business, powering growth across categories.
The poly- usage dynamics we have seen not only remain valid, but they are accelerating, and our cross-category insights and experience are increasingly important. One size never did fit all, with different preferences among different consumer groups and markets, and that remains the case. Poly- use continues to grow and is very significant in the leading new category markets, increasingly driven by multi new category poly- use, as the dual use of combustibles with new categories has plateaued.
The fact that modern oral is now clearly the fastest growing nicotine category further amplifies the poly- use trend, with the vast majority of modern oral users also using other new categories in complementary ways. In the last Capital Markets Day, I explained three of the main elements of our consumer insights transformation that are embedded in the business, especially with our marketing and R&D colleagues through our insights teams around the world.
Our digital track engine is fully operational in 22 markets, monitoring adult online search, social, and reviews. It is fast and real, picking up trends and opportunities as well as potential problems. Tracking new launches and activities, all digested via AI into themes with sentiment direct to our marketeers' screens. Demand moments helps us understand new categories, poly- usage, and by understanding the different choice drivers in different consumption moments, helps us develop products and plan our multi-category portfolio in an integrated way, as you will hear more from Anniek later. The new category journey labs map consumer journeys from combustibles to new categories, helping us encourage smoker conversion into new categories and to ensure that our new category products evolve with consumer preferences over time. Our foresights are helping get the whole business more forward-looking, directly feeding our innovation pipeline in actionable ways, giving us a competitive advantage.
I will now briefly explain some of the ways we have been improving and modernizing in these three areas and show examples of how that connects to our recent and upcoming innovations. Firstly, on AI and digital. We have further enhanced digital track, applying new advanced AI models, as you heard from Javed earlier, to capture and interpret online visual imagery to assess the ways nicotine products are portrayed and to deduce what consumers are enjoying, not enjoying, or imagining better. We have also developed a range of AI insights tools, as Javed mentioned, both internally and with agency partners, which are now available across our teams around the world. For example, AI assistants answering business questions across data sources with both text and slides for huge time savings.
Synthetic segments enabling conversations with virtual respondents from our target groups, answering questions that they were never asked as a stimulus for improving marketing executions and activation. AI testing of communications and concepts with immediate results, saving many weeks from development timelines at negligible cost. This is accentuated by further efficiencies and modernization in all other aspects of consumer research, and also the utilization of data from our connected devices to give real-time behavioral data. Together, this program of modernization is already giving us now far more insights far faster and enabling us to deliver a 20% overall consumer research cost saving.
The use of data from connected devices enables analysis of real-time behavioral data in granular detail, giving, for example, deeper visibility into how consumers use different flavors and power settings in different occasions throughout the day, helping improve product design and assortments, moving us closer to real-time consumer understanding, shortening the time between insight and action, and further driving cost efficiencies. Secondly, demand moments. These have been helping us over the last few years to understand new categories, poly- usage via the different moments of consumption, as we've said. We know the relative sizes of each moment as a whole and by category, and the reasons why consumers buy or reject brands and categories in each moment. This is fed into product development, brand activation, and increasingly now into integrated portfolio planning, as Anniek will explain later.
The progress on demand moments has been all about making it more and more actionable. It's been important for portfolio planning to understand the multiple occasions that exist within each demand moment, each with their own context, as shown here with three examples. Socialize, where vapor is the primary category with friends, but where heated products also play a role in some markets, where the occasion is time bound. Or modern oral, where, for example, hands-free flexibility is important. Similarly, consumers use different products while unwinding, whether after meals, for time alone, or while doing other things, and also when commuting, whether privately or publicly.
Understanding the roles of the different moments in the journey of category and brand development, from initial discovery to the early stages of usage and exploration, and finally, more emotional connection and loyalty, has helped us prioritize by brand, by market, and to make our activation more relevant and powerful. Modern oral is highly complementary to other new categories, with the vast majority poly- using across moments and occasions. And despite its strong growth, modern oral is still relatively underdeveloped in a range of moments that implies considerable further upside with appropriate offers and activation. This helps guide our portfolio focus. Heated products and vapor, where both present, are almost a mirror image of one another, with vapor stronger in social moments and heated products resonating in moments that are closer to traditional smoking occasions.
Both are modernizing in ways that take them closer to each other, and this is helping to guide our innovation. I'd now like to show you a short video with some examples of real poly- use consumers talking about how and why they use different products and categories in different consumption moments.
After a meal, I'd say more relaxed, something to make me feel fully satisfied. Already eating a meal is something that's quite positive.
Finally, I can relax on the couch. It's one of my favorite moments. Time for
Velo is during the commute. They do last longer. They slow release.
My pouches pretty much live on my desk. They are perfect for work, especially when I am on camera.
After a meal, when I want that intenseness, then I am definitely going to be aiming for something menthol. Outside of that is when I don't mind having something fruity.
I have to go outside to vape with my coffee. It is very important to me to have this get together with me moment. I am already thinking if Juul goes out of business and if they discontinue the cream mint tobacco, what am I going to do?
Our new category journey panels show the transition that consumers make, highlighting the multiple pathways from cigarettes into new categories, often via a period of experimentation, eventually out of combustibles into either a single or often multiple new categories. This helps us encourage that process, understanding consumption patterns and reasons for switching over time. Importantly, we also see how consumer requirements evolve over time, the longer they use new categories. In the early stages, to varying degrees in each category, ease of use, familiarity, and outward identity are key, and over time, different elements become more important in each category. Understanding this helps us support complete switching and improve loyalty. Our portfolio is now better geared towards encouraging consumers through these journeys.
We described our foresights process for powering consumer-centric innovation at the last Capital Markets Day, and this has further evolved now, utilizing AI to identify developing consumer signals earlier and to quickly understand which trends have the potential to become meaningful growth opportunities. It is essentially the same process, but now powered by digital listening and using AI. Where we previously interviewed 30 or 40 trends experts, we now identify and analyze comments by thousands of them across the world, combining that with broader trends and then quantifying potential and geographical nuance to refine the opportunities identified. This is augmenting and accelerating our foresights process, shaping innovation ideas, and inspiring activation. I would now like to share with you a few examples of how our foresights shape innovations linked to some of our recent launches. Firstly, for Velo.
Our insights have been feeding into product development, enabling us to optimize our flavors, nicotine, and moisture levels, and the balances and interactions between these to achieve just right satisfaction, immediacy, and longevity. As well as the in-mouth feel of the pouch design. These combinations and just right balances are tailored for the differing preferences of modern oral users based on how long they have been in the category and which products they are coming from, as well as for different market types, for different moments of consumption, and to address the previous gaps that we had in our U.S. portfolio. Velo+ in the U.S. achieved significantly improved consumer response, extremely strong share growth, unrivaled trial to usage conversion, and major improvements in brand equity.
The recent launches of Velo Shift in Sweden and Switzerland benefited from insights around in-mouth feel for pouch design, and the ever wider geographical coverage of Velo around the world benefits from understanding of local nuances for tailored offers. Secondly, for Vuse Ultra. We identified an unmet opportunity for premiumization in vapor, with consumers seeking greater personalization, enhanced features, and more control over their experiences. Our insights guided the design towards a premium perception of quality, simplicity, and elegance. Guided the development of intuitive technology to ensure the product is simple to use and to customize via on-device control for different moments, and guided the product development of new flavors and sensorial experiences, and the addressing of consumer uncertainty around battery and pod levels. Vuse Ultra has delivered successfully and continues to grow share at a premium price where launched, attracting consumers from beyond vapor, including heated products.
Vuse brand equity has improved. Consumers have appreciated the experiences of multiple flavors and enjoyed the connectivity, which has driven higher use of different flavors for different moments while improving loyalty. Next, the Hilo launch, which addressed the gap for glo in premium for heated products. Insights guided the premium-oriented design and ergonomics, as well as a faster, simpler user experience via new features such as fast ramp up and the intuitive screen. Iterative product development enabled us to set a new benchmark for cigarette-like satisfaction among smokers, which was achieved both in pre-launch testing and post-launch tracking. Where launched, Hilo continues to gain share of premium heated products with excellent trial to purchase conversion, attracting premium users, and significantly improving glo's overall brand equity perception. Finally, you will hear later about a new innovation already in test market that is again shaped by consumer insights.
This is aimed at smokers seeking ritual, satisfaction, and familiarity who have thus far rejected new categories. It will address the limitations of current new categories, inhalation products among smokers by delivering more familiar, simple, and satisfying experiences, keeping the essence of combustibles like sensorial satisfaction and ritual familiarity but without the negative perceived stigma of smoking. It does so in a modern, innovative way, bringing together the best of heated products and vapor, appealing to consumers of both. That also removes the elements of the experience that smokers are happy to leave behind. Early test results are very exciting, and you will hear more from Anniek about that later. To conclude, our transformed consumer insights capabilities are deeply ingrained in the business, as you will see more throughout the day. We have been further enhancing it using AI and other technology for broader, faster insights at lower costs.
These capabilities and the insights we generate are now an increasing competitive advantage, with consumer behavior progressively more dynamic, complex, and personalized. We are driving consumer-inspired innovation, activation, and improved results across categories, and there is more to come. Thank you very much, and I will now hand over to Zafar, who with his team is the recipient of a lot of our innovation-related insights, and he will talk about R&D and the innovation ecosystem. Thank you.
Good morning, everyone. I am delighted to be presenting to you on our R&D innovation ecosystem. At our 2024 Capital Markets Day, we introduced our innovation ecosystem. Today, we will talk about how we have amplified it further to enable BAT’s 2030 goals. BAT is now a consumer-led, technology-enabled company with cutting-edge capabilities. I am Zafar Khan, Group Operations Director with over 30 years of professional experience at BAT.
That would be a little too much. I worked at local, regional, and global levels in operations, commercial, and R&D roles. It is my pleasure to be here with you today. I will be showcasing why innovation is one of BAT’s most important growth engines. Tadeu has shared our Horizon 2030 ambition. My role today is to explain how our world-class innovation capabilities are helping us turn that ambition into reality. It is an exciting time. Our world-class foresights are informing our pipeline. We are powering faster, better innovation, with significantly faster time to market, and backed by serious investment and growing scale. Let me start with a short video to give you a sense of our R&D innovation ecosystem.
Innovation isn’t a single breakthrough. It is a system, one that consistently converts insight into winning products, and winning products into sustainable financial delivery. We built a world-class innovation ecosystem. At the heart of this engine are our global innovation hubs, operating as one connected R&D system from discovery to deployment. With internal and external competencies and digital capabilities at its core, we amplify our internal strengths through strategic partnerships that expand our technology frontier.
BYD, a global leader in electric vehicles and consumer electronics, is a key strategic partner. By combining its hardware, software, and power expertise with BAT’s consumable technology excellence, we deliver game-changing platforms at speed. Smoore has world-class expertise in atomization, from fundamental research to high-scale automated production. Our partnership delivers exclusive products with speed, quality, and efficiency. By co-locating teams in China, Indonesia, and Malaysia, we scale breakthrough pipelines across vapor, heated products, and modern oral.
Open innovation extends our optionality, connecting venture capital, startups, and academia to our transformation agenda. First-mover manufacturing sites allow us to industrialize innovation faster, with consistent quality and economics. The outcome is a structural advantage, speed, scale, and cost-optimized execution, with disciplined stage gates and return on investment focus enabled by product lifecycle management. All the key innovations we create are protected. Our R&D inventors work hand in hand with a world-class patents team, turning invention into strong, defensible intellectual property. What differentiates BAT is how deeply digital and AI are embedded. Data-driven R&D and faster iterations enabled by extensive use of modeling, simulations, and digital twins. This is BAT’s innovation ecosystem, world-class by design, digital at its core, creating value for stakeholders as we execute our roadmap to 2030 and beyond.
As you've just seen, R&D is a core growth engine for BAT. Driven by an innovation-obsessed mindset, world-class science, and cutting-edge technology, we are creating the next generation of smokeless experiences and accelerating our journey towards a predominantly smokeless business by turning consumer insights, advanced science, and proprietary technologies into differentiated products that strengthen our competitive advantage. Since CMD 2024, we have materially increased our focus on Modern Oral, recognizing its significant growth potential and strategic importance within our portfolio, and we are backing that opportunity with significant investment. In 2025, BAT and our strategic partners collectively invested around GBP 1 billion in innovation. That represents approximately 3.9% of group revenue and around 27% of smokeless revenue. Importantly, for our key innovation initiatives, we project returns in excess of 150% based on BAT's investment contribution. This level of commitment reflects two important realities. First, innovation is critical to long-term growth.
Two, we deliberately leverage partner investment to augment BAT innovation. This allows us to access capabilities, technologies, and expertise at a scale that would be difficult to replicate internally. The result is a powerful innovation engine designed to deliver sustainable competitive advantage. As Julian mentioned, everything starts with the consumer. World-class consumer insights and foresights are the fuel of our innovation engine. Our consumer and market understanding enables us to identify opportunity spaces earlier and with greater precision. These insights are then connected to a broader innovation ecosystem. Together, they create a leading product pipeline, and that pipeline is increasingly cross-category, scalable, and repeatable. Our strategy is intentionally multi-category, with winning propositions catering to different consumer needs. Today, across our top markets, Modern Oral has achieved the number one volume share position since Q4 2025. Vuse remains the number one vapor brand by value share.
glo continues to strengthen its position through differentiated propositions in heated products. What is important is not only where these products are today, but also the pipeline behind to follow. Across all three new categories, we are developing breakthrough innovations to further amplify our position. Our technology platforms continue to mature. We now operate a scalable technology menu. This is a library of proven technology blocks that can be deployed across the new categories. These technologies are no longer isolated innovations. They have become reusable platforms, and that gives us three major advantages: speed, scale, and cost-effectiveness. Building on the technology menu, this slide shows how we convert modular technology platforms into differentiated consumer experiences across our portfolio. It starts with the consumer. Through insights and foresights, we identify moments, frustrations, and unmet needs that matter most, then deploy the right technology platforms to address them.
As an example, for Velo, flavor and nicotine delivery technology to enhance product satisfaction without compromise. For Vuse, personalization technology enables consumers to tailor the experience to their mood, preference, and moment. For glo, we're using our technology to remove friction from the journey, delivering a faster path to product satisfaction for adult smokers looking to switch. This demonstrates how we are turning reusable technology building blocks into differentiated consumer experiences at speed and scale. We now have more than 80 technologies ready for deployment and over 100 additional technologies under development. This gives us a strong menu of future consumer-led breakthroughs, which also helps us with consistent gains across all new categories. We've improved product quality by more than 20% through relentless focus. At the same time, we've reduced time to market by approximately 30%. We've created a globally integrated innovation network, one system operating across multiple geographies.
This ecosystem provides three critical advantages: access to world-class technologies, scale through industrial capability, and speed through co-located innovation and scale-up resources. Together, these create a stronger pipeline, faster scale-up, and a sustainable advantage. The ecosystem only works if internal capabilities are equally strong. Today, our R&D organization consists of approximately 800 employees distributed across our innovation network. Our connected R&D centers work across multiple geographies. These teams are organized around technology centers of excellence, supported by strong leadership in IP, insights and foresights, science, and fully integrated cross-functional capabilities. This structure gives us deep expertise, global reach, and the ability to deliver breakthrough innovation consistently. Strategic partnerships remain a critical differentiator for BAT. Our relationships with BYD and Smoore are deeply integrated into our innovation engine. We have expanded this relationship to support a multi-category environment.
Since CMD 2024, these partnerships have evolved from category-specific collaborations into a truly multi-category innovation ecosystem. Smoore now supports both vapor and heated products. BYD works with us across all three new categories. Our partner investment has nearly doubled, significantly extending the scale of innovation we can deliver. These partnerships provide access to technologies, specialist capabilities, and scale. Capabilities that help accelerate innovation across the three new categories. Most importantly, they provide differentiated access to technologies that strengthen our competitive position. We also continue to expand our open innovation ecosystem. Today, we have over 100 active collaborations, with more than 10 technologies progressing into development during the last 12 months. This enables us to access ideas, technologies, and capabilities well beyond our own organization, and helps ensure BAT remains connected to emerging trends and breakthrough opportunities.
As Javed mentioned, one of the most significant changes since the last CMD is our progress in digital and AI. We have moved from experimentation to scaled deployment across modeling and simulation, artificial intelligence, and enterprise data and systems. Digital testing is reducing iteration cycles by approximately three months. Agentic AI is expanding knowledge access across our 800 R&D employees. Centralized data allows us to enter information once and use it everywhere. This is technology that improves speed, efficiency, and impact. Let me share a small video of how our R&D team is practically using these tools to improve our development cycles.
R&D plays a pivotal role in our future product portfolio, and modern R&D is about fast iterations and short learning cycles. The faster we can design and test new ideas, the faster we can iterate, learn, improve, and launch new products. Traditionally, concepts are designed, reviewed, physically prototyped, and then tested in a lab. This can be manual, slow, expensive, and deliver only limited technical insights. This means a single design iteration can take several weeks or even months. Modeling and simulation enables us to explore, innovate, validate, and de-risk new technologies quickly and digitally without physical prototypes and labs, accelerating our product development through rapid, fully digital iteration, concept testing, and data generation. Until now, advanced digital methods were only accessible to expert engineers, often creating a resource bottleneck. Not anymore.
With our new simulation portal, we democratize simulations and bring these expert digital tools to a wider audience, empowering all engineers to assess and iterate their designs in hours rather than weeks. In our new digital-first way of working, product developers can design their product with familiar methods, access our simulation portal, upload their design, and receive results in hours. The additional information available from the simulations gives engineers further insight into how to improve their design, enabling fewer design cycles, saving time, effort, and money, whilst empowering teams to be bold and think bigger in their vision for our products. The journey doesn't end there. Each simulation generates a wealth of information, growing our knowledge ecosystem. This information can be seamlessly linked with testing and device data, creating a connected and evolving information database.
Together, these insights pave the way for AI-driven product development, helping to unlock A Better Tomorrow, today.
As innovation scales, the process becomes even more important. Our product lifecycle management framework ensures disciplined delivery from idea to impact. It creates a direct link between innovation, investment, and value creation, and this is how we industrialize innovation repeatedly, globally, and at scale. As we've discussed throughout today, innovation is enabling growth across our smokeless portfolio. Innovation at BAT is not limited to smokeless categories. We continue to apply the same consumer-led approach to win in combustibles. Through world-class blending science, flavor technologies, and packaging innovation, we are continuously improving our offers to meet adult smoker preferences and competitiveness across our portfolio. At the same time, simplification is helping us improve quality, consistency, and efficiency with a more focused manufacturing and product footprint. Increasingly, digital and AI are helping us develop, test, and deploy innovations faster and more effectively.
The result is a combustibles business that is becoming simpler, more competitive, and better positioned for sustainable value creation. Let me close with six key messages. The consumer: world-class foresights informing our pipeline. The ecosystem: a global innovation and manufacturing network powering faster and better innovation. Speed: 30% faster time to market enabled by digital and AI. Investment: GBP 1 billion deployed with disciplined governance and superior returns. Scale: industrialization embedded early to accelerate growth and reduce cost. The future: a portfolio engine built to win through 2030 and beyond. When I look at our capabilities today, this gives us confidence, this gives us speed, this gives us scale, and most importantly, they make us ready to deliver A Better Tomorrow. Thank you very much.
We will now have a short coffee break. Please do visit the Ryde and Moment pop-ups. We will restart presentations at 10 past 10. Thank you very much.
Good morning, everyone, and welcome back. Last time we talked about how BAT was strengthening its consumer insights, rebuilding its innovation ecosystem, and launching a new generation of products across our categories. Today, we are seeing the benefits of those investments. The story is no longer about whether a multi-category model can work. It is about demonstrating that a consumer-led, multi-category strategy creates a sustainable competitive advantage. From the outset, BAT chose a different path. Rather than building our future around a single category, we chose to follow consumers. Over the next few minutes, I will show you how our innovation pipeline is delivering, how multi-category leadership is becoming increasingly tangible, and why we believe this positions BAT for sustainable quality growth. At the CMD in 2024, we showed a pipeline. Today, we are showing delivery.
Across every new category, innovations that were concepts two years ago are now in market and scaling. In modern oral, Velo Shift is already reshaping category expectations in the markets where it has launched and helping strengthen Velo's brand equity. After the initial success in Sweden, we will continue to roll out Velo Shift in our key markets. In the U.S., Velo has become the fastest-growing modern oral brand. Since January 2024, Velo's volume share has expanded from 4.4% to more than 30% of the modern oral market nationally. In vapor, Vuse Ultra is helping establish a premium segment. Within a year of launch across five major markets, it already represents around 15% of the total Vuse revenue in those markets while strengthening the perception of both trust and premiumness.
In heated products, glo Hilo has now launched across the top nine heated product markets, representing roughly 70% of the industry revenue, and has already surpassed 8% premium share in Poland. In combustibles, we have refreshed the portfolio of iconic brands to strengthen distinctiveness and relevance. We sharpen our commercial focus on where and how to win in the key 20 markets. That represents 80% of the industry's revenue. Collectively, these innovations demonstrate something bigger. They show how our innovation ecosystem is working, from consumer insights and foresight through technology and partnerships to brand building and commercial execution. Most importantly, they show our ability to convert innovation into scalable commercial outcomes. Innovation only matters if it translates into leadership. Today, BAT holds leading positions across the portfolio. Velo is the number one modern oral brand in volume share and number of consumers.
With its differentiated positioning, Velo has the strongest brand equity in the category and is the market leader in brand equity across markets outside of the U.S. Vuse is the number one global brand in total vapor by value with 44.2%, and in rechargeable closed systems with 49.8%. Vuse is also improving equity in key markets, while our commitment to responsible vaping is reflected throughout the Vaping Done Right campaign, now live in 15 markets, representing 65% of the non-U.S. Vuse contribution. glo is the number two heated product brand globally. The total glo portfolio is now enabled through two competitive platforms, with 100% of the consumables portfolio evaluated by consumers at par or superior versus the closest competitor. BAT remains the leading combustible manufacturer by revenue, with iconic global brands powered by sustainable delivery of the growth algorithm. These positions are not accidental.
They are the results of investing behind consumer understanding, building strong brands, and allocating resources with discipline. If there is one brand that best illustrates our approach, it is Velo. What started with a local Nordic business nine years ago has become the world's leading modern oral brand by far. Its success has come through a series of deliberate strategic choices. The acquisition of Winnington in 2017, the expansion beyond the Nordics, the consolidation behind a single global Velo brand, a focused innovation agenda, and a targeted market expansion. Today, Velo operates in 50 markets and stands as one of the strongest growth engines within BAT portfolio. Importantly, this success was not driven by a single innovation. It was driven by consistently combining consumer understanding, brand building, innovation, and execution over time. Velo demonstrates our ability to identify an attractive category early, build leadership, and scale globally.
It provides a blueprint for how we approach growth across the broader BAT portfolio. Velo growth story continues to accelerate. In 2024, we said that we wanted to lead this category globally. Today, we are the number one modern oral manufacturer. In the United States here, driven by Velo, we are leaders in 16 states, having increased Velo volume share from 4.4% in early 2024 to over 30% today. The gap versus our main competitor has reduced from 58 points in January 2024 to less than 10 points. Velo+ alone accounts for 80% of the category volume growth and has doubled its active consumer base to more than 6 million users since launch. In Europe, our leadership is equally compelling. BAT holds 63.6% volume share and is roughly seven times larger than its nearest competitor. This demonstrates the power of combining globally developed innovations with locally tailored deployment.
Modern oral remains the fastest growing nicotine category. Between 2022 and 2025, BAT estimates user growth of approximately 30%, outpacing both vapor and heated products. By 2030, we expect modern oral to reach a similar revenue scale to the other two categories and to continue to grow faster. For BAT, Velo is more than a successful brand. It is the proof that our multi-category model can create category leadership at scale. The advantage of multi-category is not simply having more products. It is having a system. A system built around rigorous category prioritization, powerful brands, innovation, and strategic partnerships. Over time, we have built capabilities that connect these elements together, and this gives BAT more routes to grow, reduce the dependency on any single category outcome, and a richer understanding of the evolving nicotine consumers. Partnerships play an important role as well.
They enable faster access to new technologies, materials, and consumer experiences than any organization could develop entirely on its own. As Tadeu said earlier, a good product only matters if you put it in front of the consumers, and we reach more than 11 million retail outlets in over 140 countries. Ultimately, multi-category is not just a portfolio strategy. It is a growth system designed to create lasting competitive advantages. Looking ahead, our priorities are clear. Continue generating sustainable growth and value from combustibles through our iconic global brands, supporting the overall resilience and delivery of the portfolio. Lead and develop modern oral. We believe modern oral remains one of the most attractive growth opportunities in nicotine. With Velo now the global category leader, we have the scale, brand equity, portfolio, and innovation capabilities to continue driving future category development.
Through Vuse and glo, we will maintain a focused inhalation strategy as a complementary element of our nicotine consumer portfolio, ensuring we participate across consumer occasions, while prioritizing investment that strengthen category positions and maximize returns. Together, these priorities support our ambition to deliver quality growth while maintaining balance across the portfolio with a multi-category portfolio built to serve both current and emerging patterns of new nicotine poly-usage. We are creating a coherent system of nicotine experiences. With that, I will hand over to Emma to talk about the wonderful world of combustibles. Thank you.
Good morning, everyone. My name is Emma Dean, and I took over the global Head of Combustibles role at the start of this year after five exciting years here at BAT and a career before that with Nestle and Unilever, where I held a variety of commercial and marketing roles across key international markets. Today, I am really pleased to talk to you about the role combustibles continues to play in BAT's strategy. As a consumer relevant, highly contestable category, a major source of value and cash generation, and an important enabler of our transformation towards a smokeless world. You will hear me talk today about winning in combustibles, and that word matters. This category remains dynamic, contestable, and value generating. Adult smokers who choose to continue to smoke are still making active choices, and our job is to compete for those consumers with rigor, focus, and strong execution.
I want to leave you with four messages today. First, combustibles remains a vital value pool and a core enabler of BAT's transformation. Second, we have refocused, we have re-energized, and we have honed a very clear strategy to win, focused on where we compete, how we invest, and how we execute. Third, we have the capabilities to deliver through our brands, route to market strength, people, and digital tools. Finally, together these give us confidence in our ability to deliver the combustibles algorithm over the medium term. Let me start with scale, because in combustibles, our scale is a source of competitive advantage. BAT is the global revenue leader with around 80% of revenue from our global drive and strategic brands, complemented by strong local jewels.
We are number one in consumer share with more than 100 million daily consumers, 11 million retail outlets across more than 140 markets, and number one or two positions in 25 of our top 40 markets. Behind that reach is a supply chain built for quality and consistency, with 36 factories serving our global consumer base every day. This gives us the brands, reach, and infrastructure to compete from a position of strength. We have seen a clear improvement in combustibles performance, despite a challenging external environment. Last year delivered a step-up in results, with the U.S. returning to growth, continued strong performances across other key markets, and sharper execution, helping to offset fiscal and regulatory headwinds in Bangladesh and Australia. Importantly, our stronger performance has also carried through into the first half of this year. This reinforces our confidence in the midterm algorithm.
Revenue growth of 1%-2% and category contribution growth above 2%. The key point here is that combustibles business is now on a stronger footing, with pricing, mix, and execution providing the levers to deliver sustained value growth, and being able to do so even in a challenging environment. This confidence is grounded in our recent performance, supported by the underlying dynamics of the category. At industry level, combustibles volumes are expected to continue declining over the coming years, but at a relatively modest and steady rate. The important point is that volume decline does not translate directly into value decline. While industry volumes are forecast to be down by around 2.5% per year out to 2030, industry net turnover is still expected to continue to grow over the period. This reflects the underlying economics of the category.
Combustibles remains large, resilient, and highly cash generative, with pricing and mix continuing to more than offset lower volumes. As a result, the value pool remains more attractive than volume trends alone would suggest. As you know, one of the biggest industry challenges is illicit trade, which sits around 17% of industry volume, roughly 350 billion sticks. This is not limited to developing markets. In Australia, frequent outsized excise increases and policy choices have pushed consumers away from the legal market, with illicit forecast to reach 80% of total volume by the end of this year. But illicit is not only a threat, it is also a source of recoverable value. Where excise regimes are sustainable, enforcement is effective, and we have the right portfolio offers, volume can return to BAT. Pakistan is a good example.
Following stronger enforcement and awareness campaigns, illicit is forecast to fall below 50% by year end, supporting volume, value, and profit growth. The key point is that with the right conditions, we can recover illicit volume, supporting growth, value, and stronger category economics. In 2030, combustibles is still expected to represent around 70% of total industry nicotine value. So while volumes will continue to decline, this category remains by far the largest value pool in nicotine. Consumer behavior reinforces the opportunity. For adult smokers who choose to continue to smoke, combustibles remains anchored in important demand moments, including reflection, reward, and preparation, as Julian referenced earlier. But this is not a static consumer base. Adult smokers are increasingly demanding and increasingly contestable, driven in part by poly-usage behavior. 17% switch brands, and 34% use more than one brand.
That tells us consumers are still making active choices within the category, and those choices represent meaningful value that can be won or lost. For BAT, that contestability represents a revenue opportunity of over GBP 7.5 billion. With our portfolio strength, route to market reach, and rigorous commercial execution, we are well positioned to compete for that value. Our combustible strategy is built around three priorities. First, sharpened commercial focus, targeting where we compete, how we invest, and how we manage price, mix, and portfolio. Second, powerful brands, ensuring our portfolio remains relevant, distinctive, and able to win across key consumer spaces and price tiers. Third, digital agility and seamless collaboration, making the organization faster, more connected, and more precise in execution. This strategy delivers the algorithm, 1%-2% revenue growth and more than 2% in category contribution.
The first pillar is sharpened commercial focus, being very deliberate about where we focus our resources and how we create value. At a market level, we are concentrating our effort on the markets that matter most. 20 key markets account for around 80% of industry revenue across our global footprint. This is where we are directing the greatest focus, capability, and investment while continuing to serve the rest of our footprint efficiently.
At a segment level, we are equally focused. We have identified the parts of the category where consumer choice is most active, value is most attractive, and where BAT has the strongest opportunity to win. That includes capturing highly contestable opportunities in above weighted average price, which remain highly relevant and attractive in many key markets, whilst also responding to down trading into below weighted average price offers, and addressing opportunities in the growing freshness and flavor sensation segment.
By mapping priority markets against these high-value consumer spaces, we are much more precise about where we prioritize resources. This is the essence of our renewed focus. Fewer, bigger priorities, clearer investment choices, and sharper execution in the places that can create the greatest value. Underpinning that focus is a distribution capability that very few companies can match. BAT has roughly twice the retail reach of large cap consumer goods companies. Our products are sold in more than 11 million retail outlets, supporting over 150 million transactions on average every day. This reach has been built over many years of targeted route to market investment and retail execution. We are making that impressive footprint smarter. Through digital census and retail planning, we now map and serve outlets around eight times faster and 10 times cheaper than before, powered by trade systems, data, analytics, and AI.
Crucially, we do this responsibly with responsible retailing and underage access prevention programs. We believe this best-in-class capability is what turns strategy on a page into excellence in execution at the point of sale. The next focus area is our brands. I would like to share a short video that brings our combustibles portfolio to life.
[inaudible]
As the video shows, our brand portfolio is a core strength of the combustibles business. It gives us breadth across geographies, price tiers, and consumer needs, from premium and value for money, through to the specific dynamics of the U.S. market. The important point is that these brands are not simply large. They each have a clear role in helping us compete for consumer choice and to create value. Starting with premium, we have three strong global platforms, Lucky Strike, Kent, and Dunhill. Lucky Strike combines authentic tobacco credentials with strong momentum, including double-digit volume growth over the past five years. Kent gives us a progressive platform with innovation across formats and price points, from Kent Pro X to more accessible offers like Kent Beats. Dunhill brings a clear quality proposition with a more modern expression through ranges such as Dunhill Statement.
Together, they give us strong premium platforms with distinct roles across consumer needs, occasions, and price points. In value for money, Pall Mall and Rothmans give us the ability to compete effectively where affordability and value are most important. Pall Mall is our largest brand by volume and plays a critical role for adult smokers seeking strong sensorial delivery at an accessible price. Rothmans complements this with a more modern and accessible proposition, helping us compete effectively as consumers seek value. Together, they help us win share, respond to down-trading, and keep value for money spaces competitive and profitable. In the U.S., our portfolio gives us strong positions across key segments. Natural American Spirit gives us a highly differentiated premium proposition, including the only organic tobacco range in the U.S.
Newport remains our largest brand by value and the number one menthol brand in the market, supported by a laddered offer and renewed equity campaign. Camel continues to evolve through offers such as our new Camel Craft range, bringing a more contemporary tobacco experience at a relevant price point. Lucky Strike delivers strong consumer value, supported by brand equity built on an enduring legacy in American culture. Pall Mall is a trusted heritage brand, while Pall Mall Select modernises that legacy, delivering trusted quality at a great price. David will cover the U.S. in more detail later. The key point here is that our U.S. portfolio gives us distinctive equities in a strategically important market. If you look at our portfolio as a whole, you can see we've built it deliberately around the consumer.
A key strength of our combustibles business is that we have a range of distinctive brands, allowing us to better target the right offer for each consumer and segment by market. Our brands are mapped across key segments and price tiers, from premium through value for money into freshness and flavor sensations, so we can compete with relevant offers across the consumer spaces that matter most. The result is a well-balanced portfolio that has never been better equipped to win, designed to sustainably deliver value and share across the most attractive segments. You will be able to see some of our newest offers later today at the Combustibles Innovation stand. One of the things that makes our brands so powerful is consistency with local relevance.
We develop our brand ideas and assets centrally to world-class standards, then we deploy them faithfully across every relevant touchpoint, from the point of sale to the pack in hand. That means a consumer experiences the same strong, coherent brand wherever they meet it, while we still flex for local tastes and rituals. globally developed, locally deployed.
That is how we get both scale efficiency and maximum impact from every brand investment. This is where strategy translates into delivery. Across three of our most important combustibles markets, we are seeing consistent evidence that our approach is working. In Brazil, we have delivered sharper portfolio choices and focused execution in the most valuable segments, which has driven record high volume share above 70%. In Mexico, we have used our capabilities in execution to deliver strong volume share position despite the highly competitive environment post the recent excise hike in January this year.
In Pakistan, we are showing that targeted pricing, mix management, and focused investment are delivering revenue and profit growth with volume share consistently above 80%. The specific dynamics differ by market, but the pattern is consistent. Where we apply our strategy with rigor, focusing on the right markets, the right consumer spaces, and the right execution levers, we win. Not every strategic market is yet delivering to its full potential. In three important markets under recent pressure, we have been taking focused action to turn performance around. In Germany, we have addressed our competitiveness in the low segment, supported by stronger execution, and this is building the foundation for share recovery. The recent launch of Pall Mall Classics has delivered 150 basis points of volume share in the East in four weeks, and total share performance in July is sitting at 22.9%.
In Romania, we have revamped the portfolio and launched new offers to respond to down-trading while rolling out new brand expressions to strengthen consumer relevance, delivering volume share above 50% since half one 2025. In Japan, we have improved competitiveness in low through the launch of Lucky's and the repositioning of Black Series, delivering early signs of volume share stabilization. We have reached 17.9% share of market in July. The common thread is focus. Clearer choices on where we prioritize more targeted investment and stronger execution. This is how we improve performance where it matters most. Winning in combustibles is not only about top-line growth, it is also about building a simpler, more efficient business that we can invest behind what matters most. Between 2023 and 2025, simplification has contributed to BAT's GBP 1.2 billion savings. We have exited 12 markets and significantly reduced complexity across formats, leaf grades, and blends.
Importantly, this has not compromised product competitiveness. Around 90% of products tested met their competitiveness objectives. We remain relentlessly focused on cost discipline while ensuring our portfolio meets the evolving expectations of adult consumers. Looking ahead, this simpler platform enables us to concentrate investment on the areas of product experience that matter most, including freshness, flavor sensations, modern smoothness, and authentic cues. The third pillar is digital agility, using better data and tools to make execution faster, more precise, and more efficient. In revenue growth management, modeling and simulation helps us make more precise pricing choices by market, supporting around 6.8% annual revenue growth from price and mix since 2022. In consumer insight, synthetic segments and AI-assisted tools are helping us test, learn, and refine propositions in days rather than weeks, and at a lower cost.
To support brand development, Brandverse is a digital platform that brings together our brand, product, and packaging resource together in one place, helping teams move from idea to execution faster and more consistently. Brandverse reduces brief submission from more than two weeks to less than a day, while supporting global consistency and faster local deployment, particularly for those markets that are outside of the top 20. Together, these tools help convert scale into speed, insight into action, and efficiency into value. Combined with our distribution and execution capabilities, they make BAT faster, sharper, and better equipped to win consistently in combustibles. Let me bring this together. Combustibles remains a large, resilient, and highly cash generative category, and it continues to play a key role in BAT strategy. We have refocused, we have re-energized, and we have honed a clear strategy to win.
This is a business that we manage with rigor, focusing on the markets and segments that matter most, leveraging our global brands and route to market reach, simplifying the business, and using digital tools to make execution faster and more precise. That combination gives us the confidence in the combustibles algorithm. Revenue growth of 1%-2% and category contribution growth above 2%. Managed well, combustibles remains a value engine for BAT, a business where smart choices, strong brands, and sharp execution can continue to deliver value today while helping fund the transformation towards a smokeless world. Thank you. I will now hand over to Anniek, who will take you through new categories.
Oh, thank you. Thank you, Emma. Good morning. As you have heard from Luciano, we will continue driving a strong multi-category portfolio, assigning clear category priorities to accelerate our growth. This is where I pick up for the new categories. My name is Anniek Kindts. I am the global Head of New Categories since the start of this year. I bring almost three decades of marketing experience in BAT and across the industry. I served in a wide variety of marketing and commercial positions in many markets across the world, and in senior roles at head office level. As you know, the industry transformation has been a reality for just over a decade now. BAT was the first to shape an explicit multi-category approach to creating a smokeless world. Today, BAT leads the new category transformation, and we are proving it at scale.
We are leading in modern oral by a substantial margin. We are leading in vapor by a substantial margin. We are the leaders in the heated product affordability segment and the strong runner-up in the overall category. As a result, we have consistently delivered against our targets and are committed to driving mid-teens NC revenue growth through to 2030. We are also well on our way to reaching at least 30% NC contribution margin and 50 million smokeless consumers by 2030. The conclusion is apparent. Our leadership today sets us up perfectly to accelerate our growth in the coming years. What do we think growth will look like going forward? Let's step back. Today, all industry players are participating in multi new categories as consumers are adopting NC poly-usage behaviors.
Multiple category participation is no longer competitively salient, and so we are taking our strategy to the next stage. BAT is shaping a diversified NC portfolio strategy. That's a portfolio that is focused on growth and diversified for robust and durable financial returns. In this approach, each category is positioned to maximize its contribution. Modern oral is the focal point of our growth strategy because we will be unlocking category full potential while building on our leadership to expedite our growth. Modern Oral will be complemented by our NC inhalation categories. Vapor and heated products combined will deliver sustainable revenue and margin expansion. I will unpack exactly how we plan to deliver this ambition in each of the following category sections. But first, an important word about the consumer.
Our strategy is grounded in category insights combined with deep consumer understanding and fast consumer learning, as Julian has demonstrated earlier. This consumer-centric capability is put into action in two main ways. First, it informs how we build our category portfolios. Our NC portfolios are anchored in consumer demand moments and product choice drivers within and across NC categories. This ensures we are serving the widest reach of NC consumers with targeted propositions. Second, our operational growth is deployed along a consumer-centric flywheel model. This is an interconnected ecosystem that accelerates our growth momentum, from brand recognition and reach to physical availability, on to driving consumer adoption and retention at scale. Of course, measuring our effectiveness along the way. Both consumer insight generation and deployment velocity are underpinned by ever-advancing digital and AI capabilities, as outlined earlier as well.
Clearly, the consumer is at the center of our strategy, and the consumer is at the center of our execution. Back to strategy. Let me take you to our world of Modern Oral. Let's start with the consumer and what drives their unique choice to adopt Modern Oral despite the initial usage and ritual barriers. The first choice driver is convenience, quoted by 60% of MO consumers. This includes the simplicity of usage. No devices, no batteries, no separate consumables. The wide distribution at traditional retail and online channels. Affordability, with the category typically priced at a 40 - 100 index to the average combustible prices. Also practicality of anytime, anywhere usage throughout the day. The next choice driver, quoted by 51% of MO consumers, is the category's progressive and trusted image.
MO is the furthest removed from the pain points of the smoking ritual, such as no smoke, no smell. This emerging category requires brands that are trusted and established. It may be surprising that the number one reason for consumers to leave the MO category is lack of brand trust. Finally, quoted at 43%, consumers choose MO due to its reduced risk profile. MO offers adult nicotine users numerous reasons for consideration and adoption, and those reasons are unique to this modern new category. More and more adult nicotine consumers are choosing Modern Oral. In just three years, active usage has doubled. Daily usage grew by 60%, and average daily consumption by 40%. The category now has the fastest-growing consumer base in the nicotine landscape, estimated at 24 million users today. A number expected to double by 2030.
The industry value is forecast to grow even faster, to around three times today's level, up to GBP 11 billion by 2030. Note that both the MO consumer base and value are growing significantly ahead of the other new categories, also driven by its more globalized footprint. As a result, MO is the fastest-growing category today and for the foreseeable future, both in volume and in value. Wait, there is more. What makes the category potential even more attractive is the untapped opportunity beyond its current growth spaces. First, in the places where MO is available today, incidence is on average still well below 5%. We expect this to grow by 60% by 2030, driven by category investment, category education, and innovation. Also, today, almost half of the combustibles industry is not accessible for Modern Oral due to regulatory constraints.
However, the number of countries with a bespoke regulatory framework is steadily increasing from just four in 2023 to 2032 today. With more markets opening up, the available MO consumer and value pools will further expand globally. In summary, Modern Oral unquestionably offers a generational opportunity for creating a new to the world leading and global category, and we are well positioned to capture it. In this fast-moving world of Modern Oral, one clear winner is emerging, and that is Velo. To start with, Velo captures the lion's share of the category growth offtake at about 75%. This translates into Velo reaching global brand leadership in modern oral retail share at the end of last year. Since then, we have only continued to build on our position as the number one modern oral company. At last published read, BAT grew share to 41.4%.
That's an impressive 16.5 percentage point share growth in only the last 18 months. In Europe, BAT is already seven times larger than the nearest competitor, and we are closing the gap to leadership in the U.S. at fast pace. On top of this, Velo brand leadership is anchored in strong consumer-measured brand equity, surpassing all competition growth globally and fast catching up in the U.S. as well. We have the leading brand in the fastest-growing category, a prime position from where to unlock its full potential. How do we expedite our MO and Velo growth trajectory? There's three key pillars. The first pillar of our growth strategy is to double down on the Velo brand and continue shaping it as the most salient and trusted modern oral brand in the world. As the leading brand, Velo has the credentials to guide consumers to the right category information sources.
This is where Velo translates our robust product stewardship and solid scientific evidence into consumer language. Velo is also educating new-to-the-category consumers on its unique usage ritual and product experience. This is our Pop It, Tuck It, Feel It campaign. Velo also helps consumers navigate the wide range of products along strengths and flavors. To further deepen the connection with our consumers, Velo leans in and celebrates significant cultural moments together. Our exceptional partnerships with McLaren and Tomorrowland are the most global expressions of this approach. They powerfully deliver significant contribution in brand equity and key imagery. Our latest brand expression brings our exciting Velo world to life. Our new Live Original campaign amplifies what is already unmistakably Velo. It will hit the markets at the end of this year. Our ambition is clear.
It is to propel Velo into one of the world's most recognized and loved brands, singularly synonymous with the modern oral category. The second pillar where our growth strategy is put into action is our Velo product portfolio. Our portfolio is purposefully developed across the consumer adoption journey, and we consistently deliver on the three fundamentals for consumers: flavor experience, nicotine delivery, and comfort of the pouch. First, we double down on the early stage of MO adoption to accelerate our growth. Velo helps consumers to switch into the category ritual, leveraging a milder sensation, and that's our Velo Mellow range. Winning the nicotine consumer when they first try MO is critical, because around 80% of the category growth comes from this space.
Now, once consumers have adopted to the MO ritual, they typically start a deeper discovery and experimentation, and it's in this stage that we lead with the most diverse flavor portfolio and more intense products. This is our Velo higher strength, flavor, and fusion ranges. Flavor and strength diversification is important because this is how the category usage expands to other demand moments and facilitates more regular usage of the category and of our brand. Finally, as the relationship with the category is established, we offer consumers differentiated premium propositions such as Velo Shift, and we expand our portfolio, including more complex flavors and exciting limited editions. Each proposition connects to a specific demand moment and plays a distinct role in the consumer adoption journey. All of this is underpinned by science-led innovation, proprietary technologies, and IP.
Let's take a closer look now at some of our latest developments. Let's start with Velo Shift and how we are literally reshaping the category. Velo Shift combines a uniquely shaped can, the Hex Can, a uniquely shaped comfort pouch, and original flavors such as Dragon Fruit Pomegranate. This holistic premium proposition is a first of its kind, truly transformational. It is the perfect example of how we leverage our innovation capabilities to expand the portfolio into demand moments that are more emotional in nature, such as reward or unwind, and therefore represent a higher value to discerning users. In our first launch in Sweden at the end of 2025, Shift has positively reflected on the perception of the Velo brand. It garners high interest among source of business. 56% of trialists are competitor consumers. Shift is driving up Velo share in our most mature markets.
In Switzerland, Velo Shift was launched in April of this year. Still early days, but it is already helping to build on our leadership there as well. Let me also share a few examples of what is in our pipeline of upcoming launches, each setting a new benchmark for the category. First, we are extending the Velo range. We are bringing a premium-priced mini Hex Can at an optimum lower nicotine level. Shift Mini will help consumers switch to MO by delivering a first-user experience that is smoother and more refined, with gentler nicotine delivery and improved comfort of a thinner pouch. The pilot for Shift Mini is planned for April next year in Switzerland. In the U.S., we are expanding our range with the Velo Max offer as we speak. This elevated range boasts higher moisture levels, tobacco-derived nicotine, a larger pouch, and high nicotine strength SKUs.
In Sweden, our heartland, we have established an innovation ecosystem that we call Velo Works. This is a space where we can experiment rapidly with new ideas, co-creating with our most experienced consumers. The first Velo Works drop features a dual can. One can, two flavor experiences, making flavor discovery more convenient and more exciting. Through our product portfolio and strong innovation pipeline, Velo keeps moving the category ahead and keeps fueling our growth. The third pillar of the MO growth strategy brings it all together in how we prioritize our investment as we deploy this wide-ranging portfolio. First off, we set rigorous guardrails. Our portfolio choices and investment principles are specific depending on market maturity, from category entry markets to evolving markets to established markets. These guardrails include both consumer tipping points, such as incidents, as well as commercial and operational KPIs, such as distribution levels and volume.
Once the selected Velo proposition enters the market, the operational growth model, a flywheel concept, is set in motion. This seamless ecosystem amplifies the discoverability of the brand and the offer with effective reach. It maximizes accessibility in terms of channel availability and ease of purchase. Finally, it accompanies our consumers in their switching journey from trial to adoption into brand retention. This includes portfolio and pricing choices as well. As you can see, this integrated ecosystem creates a self-reinforcing flywheel of insight, engagement, and growth momentum. It is powered by a combination of our strong traditional capabilities, for example, at retail, and category-leading commercial and consumer engagement capabilities. It is underpinned by a connected data foundation and scaled through digital and AI. Bringing all of this together, MO truly is a generational opportunity, and we are geared up to deliver its full potential.
Our ambition is building from a strong and proven foundation. In Velo, we are creating an iconic brand, synonymous with the category and already a leader. We are shaping a superior product portfolio around the consumer adoption journey, and we are building a consumer moment-led innovation pipeline that we are deploying with rigor and momentum. We have over 10 years of industry-leading nicotine science and R&D capabilities amplified in our strategic partnerships, for example, with BYD. This has already yielded the highest number of patent families in the MO industry. BAT's global distribution power and scale, complemented with our growing e-retail and marketplace ecosystem, will be our growth multiplier. With Velo, we are set up to deliver the first pillar of our NC strategy, and that is accelerated growth on a global scale.
We are poised to grow the MO category and outperform that growth with Velo, delivering an estimated GBP 4.3 billion in BAT revenue by 2030. Let me switch to the other two categories in our NC portfolio and enter the more established world of the NC inhalation categories. The combined category of vapor and heated products is the counterpart to the modern oral consumption of nicotine. First, NC inhalation is the initial stage for almost 80% of smokers who transition into smokeless alternatives. Second, the NC inhalation product experience is largely complementary to MO in terms of poly- usage and usage occasions. In fact, only 10% of MO users today rely on MO alone. Based on these consumer choice dynamics, NC inhalation is innately relevant to a smokeless transformation and to our strategy. Let's have a closer look.
Vapor and heated products have been the genesis and engines on which the smokeless industry has been built. The combined category represents a truly sizable and valuable business of GBP 13 billion revenue in 2025, serving more than 100 million users worldwide. But the industry is concentrated. 80% of each category's value is generated in 10 markets that are mostly mutually exclusive. Vapor is showing possible future upside. In volume, by unlocking contestable space through improved enforcement, especially in the U.S., and David will expand on this later. But also in value, by further opening up the premium segment opportunity. HP, on the other hand, is showing maturation, with incidence growth rates halved over the past three years. The affordability segment is expected to grow significantly in the coming years.
These consumer and category trends are leading us to carve out a clear role for NC inhalation in our diversified portfolio strategy. Vapor and HP will deliver sustainable financial returns, benefiting from a selective and value-centric approach. Let me take you through what that means, starting with Vuse. Vapor is the largest category by consumer base and features the most predominant NC poly- usage. This reinforces the role of vapor across the wider smokeless ecosystem. In this context, we have focused 80% of our investment on 10 markets, where the return potential is the strongest. We are putting our efforts behind our targeted product and innovation portfolio, driving rechargeable closed system, RCS, premiumization agenda. This is already yielding the intended results. Today, at 44.1%, Vuse is the largest brand with clear leadership in value share terms. Within our top six markets, Vuse is materially ahead of the nearest competitors.
The economics have continued to improve as well. Vuse has yielded revenue of GBP 1.5 billion in 2025. In the last two years, it has registered a gross margin improvement of 7 percentage points and a category contribution to revenue improvement of 10 percentage points. Our selective play in the vapor category outside of the U.S. is showing the returns we are aiming for, and we will further amplify this momentum. Let me show you how. Fundamental to our vapor strategy is our selectively built Vuse portfolio. Vapor consumers value a superior flavor experience, a frictionless device, intuitive personalization, and important in the category, a responsible and trustworthy brand. Vuse aims to respond to those consumer needs across three platforms. First, there is Vuse Ultra, our premium category pioneer. It delivers a connected and personalized ecosystem combined with elevated flavor pods and a sleek design.
Vuse Pro One is our most intuitive RCS with a boost mode for flavor control and simple personalization. Vuse Go serves single-use occasions. Our strategic emphasis clearly is on the rechargeable higher quality platforms, Vuse Ultra and Vuse Pro One. Let's talk a little more about Vuse Ultra. We have clear insight that the vapor segment holds untapped demand for a premium-priced, high-performing, modern proposition with an elevated identity, and this to set discerning vapor users apart. Purposely designed for this specific segment, Vuse Ultra was launched less than 1 year ago and is showing great momentum. Ultra already contributes 15% of the revenue in the key markets. It uplifts Vuse equity in premium and trusted imagery, and the source of business exceeded our expectations. 30% of Ultra users are smokers entering the NC arena.
In markets where both Ultra and HP are available, we even see inflow from HP consumers, but more about that later. In just a year's time, we are achieving sizable value share within RCS across all launch markets, including Germany, France, Switzerland, and Canada at 8.2%. You can see Vuse Ultra does exactly what we intended it to do. It elevates the category and the brand. It draws from both adult vapor and combustible consumers, and it supports value growth. To amplify further the apparent success of Vuse Ultra, we are now elevating the sensory side of premiumization to yet another level. In Vuse Intense, we are leveraging the ceramic heater technology of Ultra with a proprietary flavor extraction technology. This to create a superior taste experience. Once again, we are choiceful in where we invest our efforts. We are focusing on two flavor territories only.
The true tobacco taste experience to further increase the appeal with smokers, and the true mint experience to maximize appeal among existing vapor users and NC poly- users. This month, these new flavors made from real plant extracts will be available in three key markets. The second major innovation territory is flavor modulation. This innovation draws on the insight that up to 38% of vapor consumers actively experiment with several flavors across different vaping moments throughout their day. Our new Vuse Pro Mix is built around the ability to switch between or mix two distinct flavors on the go with a fast-charging, intuitive modern device. Winning modulation moments further unlocks premium differentiation and allows Vuse to increasingly drive personalization and an interactive vapor experience. Vuse Pro Mix will reach the first pilot markets next January. Vuse leadership is not just an innovation or product story.
Success in vapor really requires a meaningful brand that consumers trust. We are launching a new brand platform, Unwind Like You Mean It. This campaign taps into the growing consumer need for purposeful downtime, a natural consumption moment for vapor. At the same time, we continue to build trust through our always-on Vaping Done Right campaign. Vuse educates consumers on the science, the research, and rigorous manufacturing standards behind our products. Our innovations drive trial, resonant product experiences, and brand equity drive consumer retention. This combination of product and brand leadership positions Vuse to sustainably build on its category leadership. To summarize the vapor story, Vuse is the global leader in the category with the largest consumer and poly- usage pool. The economics are good and improving, and the portfolio is becoming more premium.
Our innovation efforts are focused on scalable consumer opportunities and deployed and supported in selected high-value markets. We have the brand, the portfolio, and the innovation agenda to maximize value delivery from the vapor category. Now let's turn to the heated product category. This is the largest in terms of revenue pool. As outlined earlier, the HP category is maturing, and its growth is slowing down. The affordability segment is estimated to grow, and HP consumers are increasingly poly-using within NCs. As per our posture in vapor, we have chosen to focus our investment and effort where it counts the most. 80% of our investment is allocated to the top 10 value markets that are mostly complementary to our vapor footprint. We aim to hold our leadership position in the affordability segment, and we have selectively entered the premium segment to extract additional value.
How has this strategy landed so far? glo today is nearly a GBP 1 billion brand in revenue. This is largely concentrated in our traditional stronghold, the glo Hyper affordability platform. We continue to lead in this highly competitive segment with 50% volume share and more than 10 million glo Hyper consumers. We have also now made our entry into the premium segment in the second half of last year with glo Hilo. glo Hilo has made a positive start and has already reached more than 2% premium share in the top three markets, up to 8.3% in Poland. That is quite a remarkable achievement in a very established premium segment led by a strong leader brand. We are choiceful in our investment and purposeful in our portfolio to drive scale and unlock value. That is starting to show up in the economics.
glo gross margin has improved by 10 percentage points in the last two years. Now, let me take you behind the scenes of how we drive our value maximization in HP further. As far as devices go, on the one side, we have glo Hyper, a competitive proposition to lead the affordability segment, securing our scale and revenue. On the other hand, we have glo Hilo, a differentiated premium offer designed to maximize value by attracting the most discerning HP users who are open to a new experience. Underpinning both platforms sits a range of consumables, which is the true revenue engine of this category. Our consumable ranges deliver to two objectives. First, we have the differentiated range, and that is for consumers to discover glo. We have built a strong capability in delivering a unique flavor portfolio.
Often locally inspired, such as the Japanese Sakura range, those outperform the regular range by up to two times in share. Secondly, there is our competitive glo Core range within the established taste territories. This is to ensure we deliver everyday superior product experiences and retain our consumers. 100% of our glo Hilo consumer portfolio is now evaluated at par or superior against the closest competitor. We never stand still. We have innovated and uplifted both the Hilo and Hyper platforms, informed by consumer learning and technological advancement. Let's start with our largest platform, glo Hyper. We are uplifting the game in the affordability segment with the new Hyper Pro+, which brings new consumer benefits such as a quick start with auto-activation, a five-minute session length, and connectivity. We also ensure the improved hygiene and an EU-compliant replaceable battery.
Consumers have rated glo Hyper pro+ as winning versus our competitor in critical areas such as ramp-up speed, immediacy, and taste liking. We are rolling out this upgraded technology across our Hyper markets as we speak. When it comes to glo Hilo, we haven't been sitting still either. Hilo 2 is on its way. The new Hilo 2 offers a choice of switch mode that delivers to either a smoother HP-like experience or a more cigarette-like boost for best sensory fit to consumer preferences and moments. In addition to the switch mode, we combined our five-second ramp-up with auto-start and added enhanced connectivity for further personalization. Hilo 2 comes with an EU-compliant replaceable battery as well. Once again, consumer research has confirmed the superiority of Hilo 2 versus the key competitor across critical device and sensory measures.
glo Hilo 2 is built to make further inroads into the premium segment and will be launched in Q4 of this year. So in glo, we have two device platforms serving two different consumer segments, both completed by a competitive and differentiated range of consumables. Equally important, we have understood the criticality of bringing further meaning to the glo brand in a way that supersedes the world of products and devices. The new glo expression, Feel your glo, elevates the brand for its authentic, positive perspective, an uplifting and radiating brand message. Feel your glo will reach the markets in the first half of next year. It will drive disciplined brand consistency, recognition that is truly distinctive in this category, and meaningful across the glo ecosystem. To summarize the glo story, we have a focused footprint and a clear plan to continue winning in affordability.
Our premiumization journey has started and will continue. The financial returns are improving, and so we have the brand, the portfolio, and the commercial focus to maximize value delivery from the HP category. There is one more thing that I want to share with you. As a final chapter, I want to talk to you about a fast-emerging trend across the NC inhalation categories. Tadeu referred to this in his opening. Vapor and HP users are becoming much less entrenched in their respective categories. Already, 35% of HP users and 22% of vape consumers combine multiple categories, and this to fulfill their usage needs. In addition, this poly-usage trend is the only growing trend, with soulless usage and dual usage with combustibles in a year-on-year decline. The motivation for this NC poly-usage is that consumers find the benefits of HP and vapor highly complementary.
They value the authentic taste of HP, but also the ease and convenience of use of vapor. Combined use of both also enables a wider access to different demand moments throughout the day. As a result, and as the new inhalation categories develop, consumers are increasingly driven by the sensory and easy-to-use aspects of the experience, rather than by the technology itself. This is already evident in the market. In our Vuse Ultra data in Germany, 44% of Ultra trialists are HP competitor brand users, driven by everyday convenience and the complementarity in usage moments. Empowered by these unique insights, we challenged ourselves with the question: What if the authentic taste satisfaction of heated products meets the ritual convenience and simplicity of vapor? What if we can deliver the best of both worlds in one platform?
Through our agile R&D capabilities and leveraging our partnerships, we are answering that question. Today, we have a few proofs of concept of disruptive propositions already in the pipeline, one of which I can share with you now. Let me introduce glo iFuse, a breakthrough innovation that reframes how we deliver an authentic tobacco experience. It was developed with a specific brief to combine the benefits of HP and vapor within the tobacco space. The authentic tobacco taste in glo iFuse is delivered through our proprietary flavor extraction technology applied to real tobacco leaves. This is truly a first of its kind. We combine this tobacco extract with a modern, intuitive device anchored in advanced vapor technology. glo and Vuse has been live as a test market in Zaragoza, Spain since June this year.
As I mentioned, this is a proof of concept, so we can learn in the real world. Our first findings are very encouraging, to say the least, and also surprising. Based on the Zaragoza test market and quantitative research in Germany, not only do we see smokers welcome the combined experience of great taste and ease of use, we also see high levels of interest among vapor NHB users. They make up over 40% of the source of business. Overall, consumers recognize glo and Vuse as innovative and disruptive. This solidifies our confidence in this and other innovations in the pipeline. Consumers are set to reframe the NC inhalation category, and we will actively pursue this convergence opportunity. In summary, I would like to offer you five takeouts. BAT is shaping a diversified NC portfolio strategy.
It is focused on growth and is diversified for robust and durable financial returns. Modern Oral is the focal point of our growth strategy, with Velo as the fastest-growing brand in the fastest-growing category. We will unlock category full potential while building on our leadership to expedite our growth. Vuse and glo will deliver sustainable revenue growth and margin expansion. With focused investment, meaningful innovation, and strong brand equity, we will deliver sustainable quality growth in these combined categories. The NC inhalation category itself will be reframed by the evolving consumer dynamics. glo and Vuse is our first promising proof of concept, and we will further pursue this opportunity. All of the above is anchored in a consumer-led growth strategy and a consumer-centric execution growth model. As I return to where we started, our 2030 ambition for the new categories remains solid.
It is to grow NC revenue by mid-teens, to deliver at least 30% NC contribution margin, and to reach 50 million smokeless consumers. We will drive the sustainability growth of our smokeless business and deliver our Better Tomorrow Agenda. Today, I have shown you how we will achieve this ambition. Before I hand over to James, I have an invitation. I look forward to welcoming you in the breakout sessions, where you will see our latest innovations, meet the teams bringing them to life, and experience firsthand the strength of BAT's innovation engine. Let's conclude with one more look at Velo, Vuse, and glo. Thank you for your time today.
Well, good morning. I am James Barrett, Director of Business Development, and I have been with BAT for over 30 years now, mostly in finance roles, but more recently, as part of my portfolio, looking after our expansion into Beyond Nicotine. Many of my colleagues have talked about BAT's journey to 2030. I am going to walk you through our plans for Beyond Nicotine through to 2035. BAT first mentioned exploration into Beyond Nicotine in 2021, and it is a reasonable question to ask exactly what the group has been doing in that period. Much of it is exploration and learning, recognizing that it is entirely possible for a large company to become overly enthusiastic, overestimate its capabilities, and deploy capital and resource in a haphazard fashion to little benefit. We were determined not to be that company.
We have used this time to define where we believe BAT can genuinely compete, test propositions in market, and begin strengthening the muscles that are required from those that are different to the nicotine business. Over the course of the next 20 minutes, I will unpack the nature of consumer demand in this space, explain why BAT is positioned to compete, update you on the progress that we have made so far and give you a flavor of where we will head next. Finally, I will offer a short update on how the group is approaching the cannabis market as the category continues to shift toward legal and regulated markets. I will start with what we call wellbeing and stimulation, and touch upon cannabis later in the presentation.
We use wellbeing and stimulation to describe a broad and rapidly evolving set of consumer products designed to deliver functional benefit to consumers. In the past, there was caffeine, itself a significant industry. Today we see the emergence of more multifaceted propositions catering towards multiple functional needs within the lives of busy consumers. The active ingredients that underpin this functional intervention are mostly natural and blended in such a way that they have an entourage effect, but they confer benefits beyond simple functional intervention. It is not unusual to find W&S products delivering daily vitamins or some other wellbeing benefit in addition to their core purpose. The category as we define it is growing at a sustained pace with a proliferation of formats, ingredients, and delivery mechanisms which are constantly changing. We expect industry size, again as we define it, to reach approximately GBP 430 billion by 2030.
When you delve into consumer motivations, you find a broad spectrum of need states. The W&S consumer is looking for products that help them cope with the stresses of daily life, be it increased energy, better sleep, or simple enhancement of focus in a cluttered world. Something I am sure that we can all identify with. It is no coincidence that one of our most successful channels for Ryde is hotels. Consumers seek physical interventions, gut health, hydration, weight loss. We are seeing motivations skew towards fast-acting, in-the-moment impacts. This is the area of our primary focus, although not exclusively. There is always an element of overlap in these products. From the start, we stressed efficacy. Our aim is to build products that are backed by research and designed to make a real difference.
We also recognize that the moment of consumption should be pleasurable via taste and flavor, as well as being in convenient formats. Importantly, consumers do not simply buy a functional benefit or a format. They buy brands that reflect their lifestyle. Success depends on what the product does, how the brand resonates and engages consumers, and shows up consistently across omni-channel. BAT is ultimately well-positioned to compete. We have unparalleled global reach, and this category is emerging at different paces in different forms across the globe. Our supply chain and science capabilities are world-class, and something I have been a stand by is our ability to pivot our knowledge into new sectors, leveraging our skills in procurement, scientific exploration, and R&D in ways that we have never done before.
We are learning how to innovate fast and effectively, applying group experience to avoid some of the pitfalls associated with early-stage products. Our Ryde formulations were developed entirely in-house, including the innovative packaging, and we work closely with our CMOs to refine a mass scale manufacturing. We use our consumer understanding in wellbeing and stimulation, which is rooted in consumption moments, to inform where and how we target the product. And we are learning fast in new ways of marketing. Finally, our inorganic capability via both M&A and our corporate venturing vehicle, BTV, as well as our financial capacity, allow us to create a pipeline for inorganic expansion, which is presently small scale and future focused, but as we learn, can scale accordingly with our capabilities. Our advantage is not that we already have every capability required to win.
It is that we have a combination of transferable strengths, financial headroom, and multiple routes to close the gaps. Wellbeing and stimulation consumers are repeatedly seeking how to manage how they feel and function, whether preparing, focusing, sustaining, recovering, socializing, or unwinding. Our understanding of these consumers and their needs allows us to extend into a broader range of solutions, combining different functional actives with the formats and experiences best suited to each moment. All of which brings us to what we are actually doing. Our vanguard product is Ryde. We first launched Ryde on a pilot basis in 2023. Not so much to take the world by storm, but to understand what works and what does not work in what to BAT is an entirely new category. And we have learned much.
For those of you unfamiliar with the product, Ryde is a shot-based format that is designed to rapidly bring consumer benefit through functional intervention, including energy, focus, and sleep, and is now available in five variants. The products are grounded in science, combining ingredients with established evidence of efficacy and stacks designed to deliver a noticeable functional benefit to consumers. Ryde is now present in three markets, and we know that we have created a successful product with increasing levels of trial, high repeat rates above 50% in certain of our key focus regions, and strong consumer feedback, especially on efficacy and credibility. We sell via an omni-channel model with increasing levels of D2C capability and a growing level of physical distribution. Our existing footprint gives us a head start, but the timing and phasing of rollout has to be carefully balanced against the life cycle of the product.
It is not simply a case of putting the product across our existing estate. In 2026, we completed the acquisition of our first BTV graduate, Moment, in which we first invested in 2021. Moment is an adaptogen-led, full-size beverage and is strong online with a deep and loyal female skewed consumer base. Moment brings capabilities to Ryde and vice versa, allowing us to expand both products via new routes to consumers, leveraging off each other's strengths. I couldn't be happier with where we are barely three years into the launch journey. Together, Ryde and Moment have generated more than $45 million in cumulative net revenue since launch, and growth rates are approaching 65% year-on-year. As can be seen, the group is developing new ways of reaching consumers that differ markedly from what we are used to in the nicotine space.
Ryde and Moment are built through a combination of social and digital engagement, e-commerce, and physical availability. That requires a different approach versus a nicotine business. Faster content creation, direct consumer feedback, and continuous optimization of online acquisition and retention, as well as channel-specific execution. We've made a promising start, but that is not the limit of our ambitions. As we learn and scale, we will continue to expand and grow our portfolio in a measured and sensible manner. We will continue to make inorganic moves, both small scale via venturing, but also potentially via bolt-on M&A, allowing us to enter new markets, accelerate capability building, and provide access to assets that would either be slower or less effective to create internally. We would also seek to acquire exciting brands or formats where they fit with our existing estate.
At each point of this journey, we will continue to be choiceful in how we invest, balancing the growth of the area with wider group priorities. One area that we have seen develop in recent years is the growth of pouch-based wellbeing and stimulation solutions, and it is not lost on us that pouches remain one of our greatest strengths within the core business. The challenge is that many of these pouches simply do not work, as the active ingredients are not delivered effectively and hence fail the consumer efficacy test. Again, using our science and R&D expertise, we have developed a proposition that does work and is now in the very final stages of testing. This is an example of where our superior innovation delivery platforms provide rapid development.
The Ryde pouch was created entirely in-house over a relatively short period to address an emerging consumer need in a manner that delivers to that demand. We know how to make pouches work. We know how to deliver active ingredients. The pouch format brings convenience to the nootropic space, and it fits occasions where a drink or a powder or an edible product is less practical, including productivity, physical activity, and other hands-free moments. We're exploring a pilot in this format, initially digitally, and then followed by a phased retail rollout alongside our shops, providing consumer choice and a solution that actually works. Finally, a comment on our cannabis investments. The cannabis plant holds over 100 separate active compounds, many of which are poorly researched for efficacy or effect. It is also on a a nonlinear but growing pathway to legalization and regulation in many jurisdictions.
Cannabis is fully legal in Canada and increasingly legal for medical purposes outside of North America, as the benefits surrounding the treatment of pain, sleep, and other therapeutic areas become more apparent. We are also seeing a definite shift away from traditional cannabis consumption formats, and we expect this shift to continue as existing cannabis consumers, as well as new consumers, increasingly adopt these formats. For five years now, BAT has assembled an ecosystem of investments that provide a foothold in the cannabis space, augmented by collaborations in research and development that seek to create new consumption methods as well as more refined product types. The recent merger of Organigram with Sanity Group creates a balanced recreational in Canada and medicinal player in the market, with the production facilities of Organigram augmenting the medicinal growth of Sanity, particularly in Central Europe.
Across these investments, we cover the range of use cases from purely legal recreational, again in Canada, right through to pharmaceutical exploration via our investment in DeFloria. This is consistent with our belief that the cannabis world changes at pace, and if we are ultimately to be successful, we need to keep all bases covered. Cannabis is several years away from being a meaningful contributor to BAT's story. But in a similar way to wellbeing and stimulation, we invest with care and humility, learning and building as we go, leveraging on the group's strengths where they are relevant, and acquiring and developing new capabilities where we need them. In conclusion, BAT is moving from exploration to disciplined execution in beyond nicotine, focusing investment where it has a genuine right to win and where the opportunity can become material over time.
Wellbeing and stimulation is emerging as a credible midterm growth engine, tapping into growing consumer demands for functional benefits, including focus, relaxation, and stimulation. Ryde and Moment provide the first tangible proof points, combining science-backed propositions with developing brand digital and commercial capabilities. These brands are only the starting point. As the foundations strengthen, new formats, flavors, and variants, including functional pouches, can extend the opportunity set. Selective bolt-on M&As can further accelerate capability, building, and scale. Cannabis remains a compelling longer-term opportunity with beyond nicotine. It is already a large and growing category, and its ongoing transition from illicit use towards legal and regulated markets creates a clear space for BAT to build optionality with discipline. I will now hand back to Victoria ahead of our morning Q&A session.
Sorry. Thank you, James. This morning, we have heard about some of the capabilities, innovations, brands, and technology that are driving BAT's transformation. It is now time for our first Q&A session of the day to give you an opportunity to ask questions about the presentations you heard this morning. There will be another opportunity for Q&A later on today to cover this afternoon's content. There are roving microphones within the room, so if you want to ask a question, please raise your hand and someone will bring a microphone to you. Please, may we request that you give your name and institution before asking a question, and ask one question at a time, please. May I now welcome back on stage our morning presenters. Okay, who would like to go first? Yes, if there at the front.
Hello. Good morning. Thank you for taking my question. I am Anthony, and I am a shareholder of BAT, and I am exhilarated to learn that two years ago, you were talking about managing combustible value. Now, we are talking about winning in combustible. Yet, I see a modest improvement in the guidance from 0% - 2% revenue increase of a growth algorithm to 1% - 2% increase in the growth algorithm for revenue. I want to know what led you to this humble improvement in your guidance, and how do you cascade down your vision to local execution to make sure that your vision gets executed? What do you think would be the reasonable volume share improvement in the key market, especially you mentioned the 20 markets which accounts for 80% of your revenue. Thank you.
Emma, I think that is for you.
Is it working? Hello? There. Thank you. Thank you for the question, Anthony. As you rightly pointed out in the 2024 Capital Markets Day, perhaps a slightly different positioning on how we were talking about combustibles. We are very clearly now understanding the role that combustibles plays within our longer-term strategy, and it is here to stay with us. The piece that I talked about this morning around contestability is what is also driving our focus around winning versus extracting value. This opportunity that we see within key consumer spaces is very much about how we win that space and, as you talk about, how we gain share in that space.
As we have moved the algorithm from the 0% - 2% to the 1% - 2%, I think it shows our improvement in this space, and we need to do that consistently, and we need to be able to deliver that consistency with the strategy that we have. We are certainly seeing that where we have put targeted investment in place, as I talked about Germany and Japan as very clear examples, that investment is paying off. We are very clear that we need to do this in a surgical way across those key markets. Winning in combustibles is about making sure that we do not go high and wide everywhere on everything, because that is not what we need to be doing. It is focusing on those key markets with the right spaces, with the right offers, and executing with absolute excellence in everything that we do. That is the formula.
We do expect that we can compete. As I talked about, we absolutely have a position of strength with our combustibles business, and now we are going to leverage that. In the middle there, Simon.
This is excellent. Hi, it is Simon Hales from Citi. I wanted just to ask a little bit more about the 2030 targets, just so I am clear. You talked about a number of things this morning, but when you think about the growth in new categories and the mid-teens revenue target, are you assuming within that in modern oral, some of the markets where modern oral is not available do open up? I think you referenced 45% currently. As regards to the U.S. vapor, I am sure we will talk about this this afternoon, but you highlight today again that you expect 30% of the illicit revenue to come back into the legal market. What is giving you that confidence? Then with regards to the contribution margin hitting 30%, how do we think about that evolving? Is that going to be a linear development from here, more back-end loaded?
Just help us sort of think about the modeling of that.
Okay. Hello? Hello?
Yes.
Yeah. Okay. What is behind the mid-teens is basically our assumptions that, first of all, the biggest driver will be modern oral. As you saw there, we expect the industry to triple, so it is a CAGR from GBP 4 billion -GBP 11 billion revenue by 2030. It is a CAGR of 23%.
We expect to outperform that with Velo at close to 30%, so that is what is behind the numbers and reaching the GBP 4.3 billion that we presented here. With vapor, the biggest source of growth will come from the U.S. Our assumption is that there is a potential of 30% reduction in terms of illegality, and this is based on what we are observing from the market now. We clearly see a step-up in enforcement mainly come from states. Today, 48% of the volume vape in the U.S. are sold in states that have passed some sort of legislation.
When you deep dive into the performance of the legal vapor category within those states and with these outside those states, you clearly see the trend is completely different. This is giving some reassurance for us. Obviously, the instance of the FDA from May of this year to not use their discretion not to enforce in products that are under scientific review, and the fact that now we are able to launch on a responsible manner, flavors in the convenience stores will help to be a mitigating factor in terms of the legality. That is our expectation, that with that, we can recover some of the space that is today occupied by illegal, irresponsible players. These make up the 30% by 2030. Then on top of that, we are seeing us progressing on the category contribution. We were zero back in 2023.
We finished the half-year results with 14% of category contribution. Obviously, it is not necessarily a linear trajectory because it depends on unlocking some markets. We are not expecting necessarily to see some of these major markets being unlocked. This would be a plus if you want. The likes of Brazil, Turkey, for example, is not in our basic assumption. But obviously, if one of them unlock, we have to invest more in those markets, hence, you shouldn't be expect a linear progression. We spoke about the inhalation category, the fact that we expect to have reached the peak of loss in HP this year. From next year onwards, we start seeing some reduction in loss in HP is also supportive of the direction of travel. I think there is a combination of all that.
To summarize, it is basically driver of modern oral, which if anything, is a very, very healthy category contribution per se. The driver behind U.S., that is again, a healthier category contribution. The fact that we are taking a more, I would say, thoughtful and measured approach on the whole inhalation space, focused not just on the top line, but also bottom line, that will be supportive. The plus of that would be if we have some unlock of these big markets, let us say.
Okay. Richard, over there.
Thank you. Thank you. Richard Felton from Goldman Sachs. I would like to follow up on the growth drivers for modern oral, and in particular, you mentioned some numbers on increasing incidents. I think you spoke about 3.7% in 2025, increasing to closer to 6% in 2030. I would be really interested to hear a bit more detail about how you arrive at those numbers, what could cause surprise on the upside or the downside, and basically anything to frame that opportunity. Thank you.
Anniek, do you want to start and maybe Tadeu can continue?
Yes.
Yes.
Basically, as I think I explained, we really look at markets in three different ways. There are the entry markets, and the evolving, and the maturing. Sweden, of course, is the main example of a matured market. We look back on how that market developed. We full well understand that lives in its own environment, but we do understand through that consumer journey how and why consumers will take up modern oral, and that is really, really critical because taking it up is 80% of the category growth, and that is the incidence, right, when consumers come in. Through Julian's side, we really, really look in immediate learning and especially a lot of social media listening as well, and what really drives consumers to take that on. In one of the examples, what you saw was, is that the social moment is very important.
It's seeing other people use it. That's because people don't quite know what it is and what to do with it. So when you see someone else open a can, take it, put it in your mouth, keep it there for 20 minutes or however long you do. We understand not just why consumers would use it, but how they get to know it, and how they actually start to experiment, because that's very often what it is. Learning from the few markets that have already really grown to proper, I would say, incidents, as well as how that pans out in different environments. That's also where our local insight is really important. If I take a market like Japan, we really are starting to learn what it means there, right?
To publicly take something, put it in your mouth, take it out of your mouth later is not so obvious. But we're learning that very much at pace, and we have Julian and his team to really thank for that. It's really based on consumer insight, and the numbers are based on the learning so far, worldwide, and contrasting and comparing that. Thank you.
Tadeu, would you want to add something?
Yeah, just to complement what Anniek is saying. What we have seen is that when the market reach 1% incidence in modern oral with a 50% awareness of the product, the growth starts coming exponentially. We saw that in a number of examples. The U.K. is a good example. When we launched the product was four years ago, the incidence was basically zero, no oral tradition. And when you saw this threshold of 1%, start growing really fast and today is around 4% incidence already in the U.K. And obviously this is not just the driver of growth, it's also the everyday consumption. Everyday consumption, for example, in the U.S. before we launched Velo+, was around 2.7 pouches. Today is around 4.3, so it's really growing. And as you offer a better product, you expect this everyday consumption to increase as well.
And when you separate that between occasional users, more frequent users, even further for those that are using more frequently. So all the indications are that the incidence plus everyday consumption and this exponential, the impact of any single number of those 1% incidence growing on an aggregated base, one more pouch on aggregated base, is exponential the impact that you have down the line.
Just one thing on daily average consumption. The thing is today, the big majority of Modern Oral users, they are poly-using, 90%. They are using Modern Oral and another category. But the solo users are growing, and they will continue to grow in the future. And we know that solo usage are consuming more than poly- usage. As the number of solo usage increase, the daily average consumption will grow as well.
There, Owen, in the middle.
Thank you. Owen Bennett, U.S. Bank or BTIG. Just wanted a comment to your comments on the value segment growing in heated, and what you are assuming in terms of how big that will get to by 2030. And then also alongside your hope to reduce category losses from 2027 onwards, and I am assuming less than attractive economics in value in certain heated markets where you perhaps do not have the scale. Can we assume that you perhaps exit more heated markets into 2030? Thank you.
Okay. Thank you. What we are seeing is some excise movements now in big markets. Japan is a good example. We are going through this. We just have an announcement in Hungary as well with excise increasing HP that is even higher than the ones that they are taking in cigarettes. This all will put more pressure on affordability and hence the value side of the category that has been very contested today. There is a lot of investment from different players in the value side. I think that this, combined with the excise growth and hence less affordability, will naturally take this direction. Obviously, we have a product there that is quite competitive, with Hyper.
We also believe that the value is still for these next few years is still predominantly come from premium, but not as concentrated as it is today. That is, today 80% of the value is there. It will be more balanced, I would say, from the premium to the more value for money build up, if you want. In terms of my comments on loss, we had a very atypical year this year with the launch of Hilo. We obviously will be leveraging that for the years to come. Also, like we said, we will be approaching this whole inhalation space more selectively and not necessarily by category, but with the consumer more in mind. What we are seeing is more and more poly- users of HP, for example, using vapes. Consumers of HP using vapes.
We have these fantastic products like Vuse Ultra, the new infusion product that we have just showcased today. We are going to have more alternatives within inhalation. The measure of success for us in inhalation will be within this vapor/HP to grow top line and bottom line. That is the way you should be measuring us in terms of success moving forward.
Any other questions? Damian?
Morning. Damian McNeela from Deutsche Bank. Thank you for the presentations this morning. I have just got one question on the combustible business. I think the slide said that you exited 12 markets over the last couple of years. If we are back here in a couple of years time, what does the shape of the combustibles business look like? Are there likely to be more markets to be exited from?
Emma?
Yeah, I can take it. Well, look, we have decided to approach the way the geographic exposure that we had as the same way that we approach SKUs. We are always trying to rationalize. Some of the markets that we exit were from sanctions reasons that we have to move out. Some others were conscious decision, that was really not worth having the complexity in those markets because the return was not there. We always try to address if there is potential for new categories before we take decisions to exit markets. So in this case, we did not see much potential for new categories either. It was a way to simplify our portfolio. I am not saying that we do not exit anymore. That is because we keep reviewing the footprint. I think that we are in a good space today.
I am not seeing necessarily major areas of exit moving forward. I think there is a discipline approach that from time to time, you review your geographic exposure. You measure the return of your investment vis-à-vis the risks that you incur in being in that particular market, the potential of growth being combustible, outside combustible, and make decisions accordingly. There is not necessarily a plan to exit many markets.
Anyone else? Faham.
Thank you. Faham Baig from UBS. You sound more confident on new categories trajectory, supported by innovations, data, the ecosystem, et cetera. The question is, as the contribution from new categories grows, both in terms of revenues and profitability, when you think about the midterm growth trajectory, is it possible to see BAT deliver the upper end of the targets by 2030 from currently being at the lower end this year?
Yeah, look, we are very pleased to go back to the midterm algorithm. Like you point out, we see a lot of opportunities in the categories that we have today. We are very pleased with the progress we are making in modern oral in general. We are particularly pleased with the progress we are making new categories in the U.S. All those markets obviously require investment, so I am not really in a hurry to get to the end of the algorithm. I think that will be a missed opportunity for me, to be honest, to go now and start talking about high end of the algorithm when we have all these massive opportunities ahead of us. So eventually, when you get to more the end of this period of time, when you consolidate some more of these positions, you can consider this possibility.
At the moment that we have all these investments that need to be done, and by the way, it is not just in new categories, there is also combustible. There is a lot of the value there in terms of the value pool. We are strengthening our position in those markets. Clearly, there is change in terms of the consumer dynamics in some of those markets because we see a lot of the cost of living crisis everywhere. The consumers are adult trading in a number of those markets. We see some governments taking excise hikes, which put more pressure as well. So we have to prepare our portfolio to that reality, and we are doing exactly that. We are here for the long run, not for the short term. The easiest thing for me would be to come here and talk about high end of the range in 2027.
It would be the wrong thing to do, believe me, because what we need to do is invest in the business. We have a fantastic opportunity ahead of us, being the U.S., being modern oral, being combustible, where we are strong in a number of key value pools, and we can do all that whilst delivering the algorithm, which is what we promised three years ago and exactly what we've been doing.
Okay. Thank you very much. I'm afraid we're out of time for this morning Q&A, but there will be another Q&A session this afternoon. And obviously, the BAT and Reynolds team will be around all day and at dinner to answer any further questions you have. That now concludes the morning session. The webcast will be paused shortly for our lunch break, and we will restart at 2:20 P.M. Please join me in thanking our morning speakers for their participation.
Good afternoon, everyone. I hope you enjoyed your lunch and the interactive exhibitions. It's a pleasure to be with you here in Winston-Salem. I think it's a fitting location because last year Reynolds marked 150 years. That's a powerful reminder of the endurance of the industry and our capacity to change with it. I think you'll also have seen how deeply woven Reynolds is into this city and how far its influence reaches. That history, of course, brings us to the next chapter, creating a sustainable future through science, evidence, engagement, and ultimately proportionate regulation. Our message is simple. We have the scale, the experience, and the patience to help build the conditions for tobacco harm reduction to fulfill its full potential. Scale to connect science, brands, capabilities, and markets across a genuinely global footprint. Experience built over decades, developing products, generating evidence, and engaging policymakers.
Patience because lasting regulatory change is rarely linear. It requires credibility, consistency, and the willingness to stay engaged. Those three strengths come together in the story you will hear today. Science creates the evidence, communication builds the understanding, and advocacy helps translate that understanding into practical, proportionate regulation. Regulations creates the conditions for responsible innovation and for adult consumer switching. Those conditions support sustainable value generation, creating durable advantage for the business and stronger outcomes as well for society. We spent more than a decade building our new category brands and innovation portfolio. Today, that business is fast approaching GBP 4 billion. The search for reduced-risk products reaches back to Reynolds Premier in 1988, a pioneering attempt to offer something different to smokers who chose not to quit nicotine.
And as we invest in the innovation pipeline, we also need to ensure the landscape in which our brands and innovations land is conducive to our business performance. That's the purpose of our sustainable future pillar, bringing science, corporate affairs, regulation, and sustainability together. That external landscape has never mattered more. I would argue BAT has never been better equipped to navigate it. Let me introduce our formula for success in the sustainable future pillar. Starting from the right, the desired outcome of our equation is evidence-based regulation. Acceptance of THR as a core element of tobacco control, grounded in science and evidence, can help secure that future. Danni, our group head of scientific affairs, will be joining me shortly to focus on science and the evidence in more detail. Of course, that science and evidence cannot exist in a vacuum.
Progress depends on effective engagement with policymakers and relevant stakeholders and clear communication that turns evidence into understanding. That's why we launched Omni, and we have pivoted to a digital-first communication model. Regulatory outcomes are a function of science and evidence amplified by engagement and communication. So what does a sustainable future mean in practice? Imagine a world where it is not only permissible to market and sell our smokeless products, but where their growth and faster transformation are actively encouraged. That's our destination. That entails working on two vectors, belief shaping through science, evidence, and advocacy, and communication and engagement with public health authorities, scientists, and policymakers to help shift their behavior. The relevant behavior shift is in policymaking, the design and implementation of smart and proportionate regulation. That process is influenced by public health authorities, scientists, healthcare professionals, the media, and NGOs.
It is a complex decision-making web, but it can be informed by credible evidence and open engagement. Our starting point, though, is not where we want it to be. Each year, we run a multi-country THR survey across our markets. We've just completed the third wave. Whilst there are strong signs of progress, it remains true that half of the policymakers surveyed and nearly two-thirds of all medical professionals erroneously conflate nicotine with cancer, and in so doing, reject the fundamental principles of THR. This must and will change. Across BAT, our teams are clearer, better organized, and more aligned than ever. Our approach is built on four clear priorities. First, turning scientific leadership into evidence and advocacy. Second, being courageous and persuasive in our communication and engagement to accelerate the acceptance of THR. Third, converting evidence, advocacy, and communications reach into evidence-based regulatory and fiscal outcomes.
Fourth, protecting and strengthening our enterprise reputation across our other sustainability pillars. Corporate affairs has transformed since I joined the management board in 2012, but its core challenge has not. Transformation and a multi-category portfolio have changed the opportunity. Digital and social media have changed the operating environment. But the need to tell our story clearly, credibly, and influentially remains. Last year, we pressure tested our operating model to ensure that it's fit for purpose. Think of it, if you like, as a relay race, an ecosystem where transformation leads to portfolio to science to evidence to policy and advocacy, all underpinning communication and engagement, with the outcome being the regulatory landscape in which we operate. Then we make sure that we measure. Measurement creates momentum by helping us learn, adapt, and repeat what works.
I'd now like to focus on the science and evidence part of the formula, so please give a big, warm welcome to Danni Tower, our Group Head of Scientific Affairs.
Thank you, Kingsley, and good afternoon to you all. It is fitting to discuss tobacco harm reduction here in the U.S., 25 years after the initial publication of the then Institute of Medicine's Clearing the Smoke. Its principles for assessing the scientific base for tobacco harm reduction still shape our thinking and are reflected through BAT's formula for success. Our formula is built on the belief that transformation depends on confidence from all stakeholders. Confidence from policymakers and regulators, from public health authorities and healthcare professionals, who in turn can build confidence in consumers and wider society. That confidence begins with science. Science that answers important questions, creates understanding, and informs decisions. Today, I want to illustrate how we utilize science and evidence to drive BAT's formula for success to accelerate responsible innovation, underpin tobacco harm reduction evidence, and address misconceptions that continue to hinder progress.
Because for tobacco harm reduction to reach its full potential, belief must rest on evidence. At BAT, we use science as a differentiator to power both our quality growth and our sustainable future ambitions. This year marks 70 years of science and innovation at BAT. Over these past seven decades, we have built world-class scientific expertise across multiple disciplines, supported by a global network of scientific and innovation centers. That capability is particularly powerful in both its depth and its breadth. It allows us to generate and analyze evidence at scale, rigorously assess our products, and engage credibly on important public health questions. As BAT transforms, that capability becomes an increasingly valuable strategic asset because credibility is earned, not claimed, and in science, credibility is earned through rigorous evidence, peer review, and a commitment to continuous learning.
At its core, tobacco harm reduction depends on innovative smokeless products that meet the highest standards, and that is why we apply rigorous scientific stewardship before and after product market launch, ensuring that products are continually assessed throughout their lifecycle against demanding scientific and regulatory standards. For us, stewardship is a key differentiator of responsible manufacturers and a fundamental part of how we discharge our duty of care to consumers while supporting the long-term sustainability of our business. When it comes to scientific research, at BAT, our ambition as scientists is to generate robust evidence that shapes decisions and advances public health. An oversimplified question that we are often asked is: how do you determine whether a product has a reduced risk profile compared with smoking? More than a decade ago now, we published a weight of evidence framework to answer it.
This scientific assessment framework examines three critical areas. First, product characterization through combustion, emissions, and toxicology studies. Second, consumer exposure through use behavior, pharmacokinetics, and clinical exposure studies. And third, potential population-level impact through population health modeling and the monitoring of real-world outcomes over time. Together, these findings support an evidence-based conclusion about a product's risk profile. Applying this disciplined approach across our smokeless portfolio, we have concluded that for smokers, completely switching to any of our three smokeless product categories has a lower risk profile than continued smoking. This extensive body of evidence, supported now in 2026 by more than 280 peer-reviewed scientific publications, became the foundation for Omni, which combines BAT's THR science with findings from world-class independent researchers around the world. And importantly, that evidence base continues to grow every year.
As we look ahead to our next chapter, we are exploring new ways in which we can transform how this and new science itself is conducted. Evidence generation has traditionally been slow and resource-intensive. However, today, digital and mobile technologies, advanced data analytics, and AI-enabled simulation are creating opportunities to collect real-world data more effectively and generate insights more rapidly. BAT is building a more connected and digitally empowered scientific ecosystem to scale scientific understanding in new ways and to accelerate learning and evidence-based decisions. Ultimately, no matter how sophisticated our science becomes, one question matters more than any other. Does tobacco harm reduction reduce smoking and improve population health? The Institute of Medicine set out the theory of tobacco harm reduction.
Sweden provides compelling real-world evidence, and that's because Sweden, often referred to as the vanguard THR country, offers one of the clearest and longest running examples of tobacco harm reduction at population level. And Sweden is not alone. Across multiple markets, as you can see here, for example, New Zealand, the U.K., and Japan, we see a remarkably consistent pattern. Correlation between smokeless product adoption and declines in cigarette volume consumption or smoking prevalence. The crossover points on these graphs mark important moments in each country's tobacco harm reduction journey. Different markets, different cultures, different regulatory environments, yet the direction of travel remains strikingly similar. The next question is whether these behavioral changes can translate into meaningful public health outcomes. Encouraging signals are emerging, especially in early adopter markets of smokeless products.
Sweden continues to attract attention because widespread adoption of smokeless products and reduced smoking prevalence has been associated with a lower smoking-related disease burden than in many comparable markets. The chart on the left here shows Sweden recording Europe's lowest level of smoking-related cancer deaths based on World Health Organization data. Epidemiological signals are also beginning to emerge elsewhere. The middle chart here shows independent academic research from Japan, which has reported reductions in acute coronary syndrome hospitalizations in areas with a higher prevalence of smokeless products. Now, epidemiology takes time, but these observations are important because they point beyond behavioral change to the possibility of improved health outcomes. And if tobacco harm reduction can ultimately be realized at global scale, the potential impact could be profound.
On the right here, third-party modeling suggests that more than 100 million lives could potentially be saved from premature smoking-related deaths by 2060 if tobacco harm reduction approaches were widely adopted. Yet, despite decades of scientific progress and a growing body of evidence, two fundamental misconceptions continue to shape policy debate. The first misconception is that nicotine is the primary cause of smoking-related disease. The factor that corrects it is on the left. The scientific evidence referenced, as you can see here, by trusted independent voices such as the National Health Service and the Royal College of Physicians in the U.K. tells us otherwise. While nicotine is the addictive component of cigarettes, most smoking-related harm comes from the hundreds of other chemicals generated by combustion. The second misconception is that all nicotine products carry the same level of risk.
Again, the global body of scientific and real-world evidence suggests otherwise. Why does correction of these misconceptions matter? Because THR and transformation depend upon informed policymaking. If policymakers cannot distinguish between products, proportionate regulation becomes more difficult. If regulators, health authorities, and healthcare professionals cannot distinguish between products, opportunities to accelerate harm reduction may be lost. If policy and regulation does not help smokers distinguish between products, complete switching is less likely. Evidence must lead to understanding, and understanding into action, and that is why science remains a strategic capability for BAT. The challenge is no longer only to generate evidence, but to ensure that it is understood and acted upon. That is perhaps the most important point to leave with you today. Science creates evidence, and evidence creates understanding, and understanding creates the conditions for change. If we want to build understanding, science is where change begins.
Thank you, and now back to Kingsley.
Thank you, Danni. I think Danni has shown how decades of science create critical capability and competitive advantage. Science is a keystone of our business today and tomorrow, and we remain committed to advancing it. Of course, we must be equally innovative and front-footed in communication and engagement within our formula for success. Through our communication engagement, we focus on building understanding and shaping beliefs of THR. We believe it should underpin smokeless regulatory policy worldwide. Regulators have a choice. Regulate through sound THR thinking now based on the weight of evidence, or wait for the likely two-decade emergence of epidemiology. Acting now can change the course of public health forever. That is why we launched our Omni, our manifesto for change, a mandate for action. Omni was never just a book, a publication, or a website.
It's a dynamic strategic communication chassis with thought-leading narratives and compelling evidence. In the recent launch of Omni 2.0, a major upgrade, the R- squared or correlation between the stringency of tobacco control measures and smoking incidents was just 0.2. That is to say, there is hardly a correlation at all. Recent history suggests, however, that when smart progressive regulation allows access to responsibly manufactured and marketed smokeless alternatives, smoking rates fall faster, as we've seen in the U.S., Sweden, Canada, and the U.K. Omni was launched at London Science Museum in September 2024. Some of you were there. In less than two years, it has become the central platform through which we bring together science, evidence, advocacy, and communication. Its strength is focus. Rather than dispersing our effort, Omni channels our investment and energy through a single strategic proposition, and we've deployed the proposition in a multifaceted way.
An internal AI toolkit, Ask Omni, gives 40,000 employees direct access to its content. Omni now facilitates leadership development and transformation training across the business. Today it was clear and has been clear since day one, we needed to become much more front-footed in our corporate affairs ambitions, and we have. Omni has become the focal point for that ambition, creating a global corporate platform through which we can communicate science, build understanding, and engage relevant stakeholders at scale. Its impact extends beyond both the physical and digital worlds. Through activation and stakeholder engagement in more than 20 markets, we have brought together policymakers, regulators, healthcare professionals, scientists, and other influential THR voices. External recognition followed, including PR campaign of the year at the Platinum PR Awards.
I think the most important measure of success is Omni has helped create a more modern, more visible, and more influential voice in support of evidence-based THR. One of the more distinctive expressions of Omni has been The Smokeless Word podcast. The objective was simple: create a platform for long-form, credible, and open conversation with relevant stakeholders. In an increasingly fragmented media environment, that matters. The program brings together four broad groups of voices. First, BAT leaders who can explain our transformation. Second, recognized experts in science, public health, and THR. Third, policymakers, regulators, and political leaders who help shape the external environment. Fourth, leaders from the worlds of transformation, innovation, and high performance. Across nearly 30 episodes, guests have included former prime ministers, a former health minister, serving politicians, business leaders, and respected media figures. The result, I think, is more than just a successful podcast.
It's a communication platform that reflects the type of company BAT is becoming. More open, more engaged, and more willing to engage confidently. Fittingly, the last episode is a very special podcast outing with Tadeu in the hot seat. I'd encourage you all to watch it. Omni and The Smokeless Word can do so much, but the external debate demands more targeted interventions. Our front-footed approach means addressing specific industry issues directly. That's why we launched single-issue corporate campaigns, starting with Vapers Deserve Better and followed quickly by Think Progress, Think Pouch. These campaign solutions have a consistent creative refrain, and they work under the banner of Let's Go Smokeless. Six further campaigns are ready, with more to follow. The models gives the regions and markets a toolkit tailored for their local needs. Because communication is not the end in itself.
Communication builds understanding shapes belief, and belief creates the conditions for better regulatory outcomes. As I mentioned, we are rigorous about measurement because belief shaping only matters if it changes perceptions in the real world. That is why we run an annual study, now spanning 21 international markets, tracking attitudes among nicotine users, healthcare professionals, and policymakers. Three years in, the data has become an invaluable guide to where progress is made, where misconceptions remain, and where we should focus. We have just completed the third wave, and the direction of travel is encouraging. Among nicotine users, perceptions of THR have improved steadily over the period. If these trends continue, we believe they point towards a future in which THR enjoys broad and growing public support by 2035. More encouraging is the progress we are seeing among policymakers in their understanding and acceptance of modern oral.
Through our engagement efforts enabled by Omni, policymakers have remained a priority stakeholder group for us. Acceptance of the THR potential of modern oral has increased by 14 percentage points over the last two years among policymakers in tracked markets. We believe that matters because perceptions shape policy, and policy shapes smokers' perceptions. Of course, it has to be said, the picture is not uniformly positive. Perceptions continue to improve, albeit some misconceptions remain. Nicotine is still wrongly associated with specific smoking-related harms by many respondents. The perceptions of vapor particularly remain sensitive to shifts in public and the media debate. That said, we remain encouraged by this progress. The broader point is this: we are measuring what matters, allowing us to focus our resources on the stakeholders, markets, and messages where we can have the greatest impact.
Looking ahead, we are also embracing the opportunities of leading-edge technology and AI. We are developing OmniBrain, a modular AI system powering the key stages of our operating model. OmniSignal, a real-time communication tracking tool, will combine external signals with our information, data, and policy within a walled LLM to monitor and interpret what the world is saying to us and what we should say to the world. OmniContent, an engine for rapid real-time content development and deployment, will pick up from OmniSignal. OmniMetrics, a comprehensive measurement module, will measure the outputs and outcomes of our work. Together, these modules make OmniBrain a leading corporate affairs technology solution, increasing pace, efficiency, impact, while shifting resources from repetitive tasks to more frontline engagement. Finally, we return to the critical output in our formula, regulatory outcomes. Regulation will be a critical enabler of our success.
In corporate affairs, market importance doesn't always follow the commercial Pareto. Let me explain. At the FCTC's COP, for example, each member has one vote, making every nation relevant. Likewise, in Europe, every member state matters in directives such as the TED and TPD. Our aim remains the same, smartly regulated, orderly marketplaces, level playing fields where responsible companies are encouraged to transform. For us, smart regulation is not a loose concept. Building on work which actually began during Australia's plain packaging debate, we developed a 10-step framework that now anchors a dedicated campaign. The objective is not to prescribe a particular outcome, but to encourage regulatory approaches that are evidence-based, proportionate, and workable.
Of course, in the real world, this is sadly much easier to say than to do, as has been proven by the ideological dogmatic regulation, such as Australia itself, a poster child for precisely how not to tax and regulate the tobacco and nicotine market. But experience has shown that the most effective regulatory frameworks tend to share a common set of characteristics. Our framework assesses those characteristics systematically. With them consistently applied, there is a greater likelihood of achieving balanced and effective regulatory outcomes. Turning very briefly to the FDA before David covers it in more detail. While we welcome the FDA enforcement discretion communication from May this year, significant challenges do remain. The PMTA system has created prolonged uncertainty for responsible manufacturers, while illicit products have continued to proliferate.
Moreover, the FDA's approach matters well beyond the U.S., given its influence on regulatory thinking around the world. Turning from the FDA to Europe remains a highly significant supranational regulatory arena. Both TED and TPD remain active policy discussions with substantial regulatory activity ahead. Progress on TED proved challenging despite six compromise proposals under the Cyprus presidency. Unanimous agreement among the 27 member states is yet to be achieved. Progress was made across categories, albeit 19 member states raised concerns with at least one aspect of TED or the other. On TPD, we are awaiting publication of the impact assessment and currently expect a draft of the TPD from the commission by around December. An intensive period of discussion and negotiation is likely to follow through 2027. We will continue to advocate for regulation that is evidence-based, proportionate, and importantly, enforceable. Turning now to regulatory progress itself.
Of 80 focus markets, as today I said, at least 70 of them have one or more legally available new category. Furthermore, the real-world evidence of Sweden and near smoke-free status is based both on their oral tradition and the pro THR stance. The U.S., New Zealand, and the U.K. also provide evidence of transformation supported by enabling regulation. Nine markets have risk proportionate category regulation, probably the gold standard, if you like, of smart regulation. However, there have not been positive outcomes everywhere. Markets like Germany and France in Europe, Turkey, Australia, and Brazil remain challenging. Regulatory change in these markets matters, as does smarter, more durable regulation in existing smokeless markets. We will continue to work hard advocating for smarter regulation. Which brings me to modern oral, a critical focus for us in corporate affairs. In 2021, only a handful of markets had modern oral regulation.
Since then, it has become a top priority. New market regulation has been introduced at the pace of six to seven markets per year. Today, more than 30 countries have regulation and a further seven with emerging regulation covering at least one aspect of the regulatory ecosystem. 16 of the EU's 27 member states now regulate the category. That is notable because that is a numerical majority of EU countries. The World Customs Organization has preserved differentiated customs coding for modern oral, a possible precursor to regulatory recognition. Finally, in the U.S., the FDA's progressive position has enabled a more level playing field and a more innovative Velo lineup. We are extremely clear about the focus required on modern oral, and it is not simply about regulation. It is about helping create the conditions for category sustainability, stakeholder confidence, and long-term growth, helping the foundations for future value generation.
To conclude then, evidence-based regulatory and fiscal outcomes are essential to a sustainable future and long-term value delivery. Since 2023, under Tadeu's leadership, we have reinvested in scientific, corporate, and regulatory affairs capability. Today, we are in much better shape to navigate the external environment, positioned for the future with clear thinking on our operating model, the right leadership, a clear focus on science and evidence, and a stronger, more innovative corporate communication capability. You have heard a lot today about the science, the evidence, and our communication coming together to shape the external world. It is undoubtedly a story of ambition, progress, and I think in many ways, determination. This effort is about creating a sustainable future, a prominent pillar of our group strategy, and we are making progress, albeit, as I have said, it is not always linear.
We feel very confident about the future of transformation and our ambition of a smokeless world, a world where transformation is not only permissible but encouraged. Just imagine that world, and please take a look at this video before I hand over to David. Thank you.
Imagine a world where A Better Tomorrow is no longer an ambition, but a reality. Where innovation is encouraged for the role it can play in driving positive change, and nicotine is better understood by policymakers, regulators, and health practitioners alike. Imagine a world where major nations support and advocate for tobacco harm reduction, where the modern oral category is regulated globally, and trust is earned through transparency and doing the right thing.
Imagine a world where smokeless alternatives are responsibly regulated worldwide, giving access to the people who need them. Where smart regulation evolves alongside innovation, creating clarity, consistency, and confidence. And where sustainability is not a target to meet, but a foundation to build on. This world will not be built by one company, one market, or one moment. A Better Tomorrow is not something we are simply imagining. It is something we are building with every step we take. Imagine a world, a smokeless world, a better tomorrow.
Well, good afternoon, and it is good to be back with you today. This morning, I welcomed you to Winston-Salem and shared some of the history that connects Reynolds to this city. This afternoon, I want to focus on the opportunity ahead, why the U.S. is one of the most attractive nicotine markets in the world, and why Reynolds is well-positioned to win. The U.S. opportunity is substantial, and it will be won by those equipped to lead through change. The pace of transformation continues to accelerate. Consumer preferences are changing, regulation is evolving, and value pools are shifting. We have the brands, the capabilities, and the scale to lead through that change while continuing to deliver sustainable value.
As the cornerstone of BAT strategy, Reynolds plays a pivotal role in achieving A Better Tomorrow, and growing tomorrow is how we deliver that purpose in the United States. Reynolds has a clear mandate to deliver a winning performance and turn the U.S. opportunity into sustained financial returns. In February of this year, we stated our multi-year investment of GBP 2.5 billion by 2030 to strengthen our capabilities, expand capacity, and support long-term growth. This investment is expected to create more than 2,000 direct and indirect American jobs across Reynolds and our U.S. supply network. That commitment is already translating into action. Over the past two years, we have invested more than $200 million in U.S. manufacturing, including increased production capacity for Velo+. Our contribution also extends beyond our own operations. In 2025, Reynolds was the largest purchaser of U.S. tobacco leaf from American farmers.
Growing tomorrow is ultimately about disciplined investment, strengthening Reynolds' competitive position, supporting the U.S. economy, and delivering sustainable shareholder returns. At our 2024 Capital Markets Day, the U.S. outlook contained several significant uncertainties. Since then, we have successfully navigated a dynamic environment, positioning the U.S. business to deliver the algorithm. The cigarette category decline has moderated. Reynolds has returned to revenue and profit growth in combustibles, and Velo+ has built momentum. We are also seeing greater attention at both federal and state levels of enforcement against illicit vapor products, a positive development for Vuse, our leading vapor brand. Not every issue is resolved, and we remain disciplined in how we plan for regulatory and category risk. But the direction of travel has improved considerably. We have moved from managing significant uncertainty to pursuing a clearer set of opportunities. The central message is simple.
The U.S. is the cornerstone of BAT strategy. With more than 60 million adult nicotine consumers, it is already the largest nicotine revenue pool and continues to grow. Consumer behavior is becoming increasingly multi-category, with approximately 65% of adult nicotine consumers interacting with or migrating towards new categories. Against that backdrop, Reynolds brings a multi-category portfolio of leading brands, trade scale, and proven commercial capabilities. Today, we have the fastest-growing new categories brands aligned to where the adult consumers are moving. The underlying market data reinforces that opportunity. Total nicotine in the U.S. has grown since 2023, driven by expansion in vapor and oral. While combustible volumes continue to decline, the category's value pool remains substantial and resilient. At the same time, vapor and oral are creating incremental industry value and are expected to grow through 2030.
Altogether, the U.S. represents an estimated GBP 42 billion nicotine revenue pool, with a projected annual growth of 4.3% from 2025 - 2030. Our objective is to capture growth where the market is expanding while continuing to deliver value in traditional categories. Reynolds' strength comes from a multi-category portfolio positioned to capture that growth. The U.S. new categories revenue pool is already significant, at an estimated GBP 12 billion in 2025. It is supported by approximately 40 million adult consumers with high levels of interaction and migration across categories. Adult consumer momentum is building, and we estimate this revenue pool could reach GBP 17 billion-GBP 25 billion by 2030. This opportunity is becoming more accessible as the regulatory process evolves and state enforcement increases. Vuse is strengthening its leadership, and Velo+ is demonstrating that we can translate a strong global proposition into the U.S. market.
The prize is meaningful, but our confidence is based on observable momentum, not simply market projections. While the size of the opportunity matters, what is most compelling is how well positioned we are to capture it. Reynolds brings scale, strong trade coverage, commercial execution, and operational rigor. BAT adds leading brands, a global science and R&D ecosystem, and increasingly sophisticated digital capabilities. Together, these capabilities give us the ability to identify consumer shifts, develop winning products, and execute at scale. This positions us to capture a significant share of the growing U.S. nicotine revenue pool by 2030. The transformation of the U.S. market is already well underway. Since 2017, the number of adult cigarette consumers has decreased by approximately 20 million. Over the same period, the data indicates that vapor and modern oral have expanded significantly. The overall number of adult nicotine consumers has not grown.
Instead, we are seeing greater migration to new categories and more consumers using multiple formats. Reynolds' portfolio is aligned with the choices adult consumers are making, enabling growth through our multi-category options. The pace of change within the U.S. market has accelerated over the last four years. In 2022, 46% of adult nicotine consumers were either using new categories exclusively or alongside traditional products. In 2026, that number is projected to reach 68%. We are also seeing growth in new category solo adult consumers, not simply occasional trial. This reinforces the need for a portfolio that offers a range of product choices. Adult consumer migration to new categories is not limited to one region or a small number of urban markets. The pace varies by state, but the direction of travel is consistent across the U.S., and Reynolds is advancing faster than the wider industry.
Looking deeper, you can see that we are outpacing the industry in 35 states. That performance reflects the strength of Vuse, the momentum of Velo, and the breadth of our smokeless portfolio. Combined with our national scale and trade infrastructure, these strengths give us a clear advantage across diverse market conditions. We are not waiting for the market to transform. We are at the forefront of that transformation. Today, 65% of U.S. adult nicotine consumers interact with or have migrated to new categories. More than half of combustible consumers are using other nicotine products, reinforcing the importance of a multi-category portfolio. Reynolds leads the U.S. market in adult nicotine consumers with more than 22 million choosing our brands. We also lead among smokeless and new category consumers. That breadth gives us multiple routes to build relationships as nicotine consumer preferences evolve.
The clearest evidence of strategy working is total nicotine share. Reynolds total nicotine share has seen steady quarter-over-quarter growth since the first half of 2025, reaching 34% year to date, an increase of 119 basis points versus the full year of 2025. That growth reflects contribution across the portfolio rather than reliance on a single nicotine category. It demonstrates that we can deliver value in traditional categories while building stronger positions in faster-growing segments. This is the outcome we are focused on, sustained growth in our relevance to adult nicotine consumers, resulting in total nicotine share growth. Modern oral is the fastest developing segment in the U.S. nicotine market. Its growth is supported by two factors. More adult nicotine consumers are choosing the category and greater daily product adoption. The modern oral adult consumer base has more than doubled since 2022 and now sits above 16 million.
Daily consumers are accounting for a greater share of the category, demonstrating deeper adoption. As a result, the volume of modern oral servings continues to grow. Our focus is to serve that growth responsibly and build Velo into a sustained national leader. We are making significant progress towards leadership. Velo+ has delivered strong momentum since launch. Volume has increased 158% year to date compared to the same period last year, and the brand has captured 30% share of the market. As important, more than 70% of those who try Velo purchase it again. The brand's adult consumer numbers have nearly doubled from 3.4 million - 6.2 million. Momentum remains strong with Velo+, accounting for 80% of industry volume growth and 81% of industry value growth year to date. Velo is now the number two modern oral brand nationally, giving us a strong platform for further growth.
The numbers are strong, and we remain focused on sustained adult consumer resonance and disciplined value creation as we pursue market leadership. Our Velo and Grizzly modern oral portfolios lead in 16 states, and together with our established traditional oral portfolio, have positioned Reynolds as the national leader in total oral. This demonstrates the value of our multi-category strategy, bringing established scale, trade relationships, and category expertise to high-growth modern proposition. Combined, these strengths create a foundation for continued growth across our oral portfolio. As we referenced at CAGNY, we have a strong innovation pipeline, and this month we Velo Max. inspired by our leading global Velo Max offers a higher moisture, larger pouch format, and a choice of strengths and flavors. We're taking a phased approach to distribution with plans to reach nearly 100,000 outlets by early next year.
It is early days, Velo Max broadens our proposition and gives adult nicotine consumers greater choice as we build upon Velo+'s momentum. Modern oral can play an important role in tobacco harm reduction by giving adult smokers an alternative to cigarettes. The insights shown here indicate that recent Velo purchasers reported a substantial reduction in average daily cigarette consumption after six months, and 64% of participating adult smokers reported switching completely to Velo. The results offer evidence of the role modern oral may play for adult smokers who choose to move away from cigarettes. Our tobacco harm reduction efforts are grounded in evidence-based science. We believe we have a responsibility to share that science and engage constructively with regulators to build understanding of relative risk and the role modern oral can play. This is how we create a mutual win for America's public health and our commercial business.
An effective harm reduction agenda must be supported by a regulatory framework that is good for adult consumers, public health objectives, and legitimate industry participants. We are seeing meaningful progress toward a clearer and more practical U.S. regulatory environment. Regulation should create a level playing field, support a regulated marketplace, and protect consumers. Clear authorization standards and strong enforcement must work together. Regulation must prevent irresponsible marketing and exclude products with underage appealing features or inadequate safety standards. Responsible manufacturers should be able to compete, innovate, and invest with greater clarity. Illicit disposable vapor products have distorted the U.S. market for several years. We are now seeing more active enforcement at both federal and state levels. Today, state regulations cover 40% of weighted legal industry volume. Encouragingly, seizures and raids have also expanded, and public discussion about how to address this issue continues to increase.
Progress is evident, but materially reducing the illicit market will require federal and state agencies to broaden enforcement and intensify their efforts. When rules are applied effectively, adult consumers are better protected from illicit and unauthorized brands, can compete on a more level playing field. The enforcement environment for illicit vapor products is beginning to change meaningfully. What started with tighter import controls has developed into a more coordinated government-wide response across borders, distribution networks, and retail. The scale of the actions is significant. This includes a nationwide sweep that removed 2.1 million illicit products across seven states, followed by the largest federal seizure of its kind, involving 4.7 million units. in May of this year, FDA, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and the United States Coast Guard executed the largest maritime seizure of illegal vapor products.
The action stopped more than 18 million unauthorized e-cigarettes, valued at over $175 million, from entering the country. Beyond the federal efforts, 22 states have now enacted directory or enforcement laws, strengthening controls closer to the point of sale. This is meaningful progress, but there is much more to do. Sustained, coordinated enforcement by FDA, CBP, DOJ, ATF, and state agencies will be critical to maintaining pressure on the illicit market. Tighter legislation is increasingly being matched by visible enforcement. For responsible manufacturers, this supports a more level playing field and helps protect adult consumers from illicit products. As enforcement strengthens and the legal market becomes more clearly defined, we believe the best positioned authorized brands will capture a greater share of the category, and the numbers are starting to bear this out.
Disposable consumer and incidence trends began to decline in the second half of 2025 as enforcement actions began to take hold. This trend is continuing in 2026. Which brings me to Vuse. Vuse is demonstrating what a responsibly marketed vapor brand can achieve in a better enforced environment. The brand's volume is significantly outperforming in the closed system segment, where we compete up almost 8% versus an industry of 0.6. Even more telling, the brand's volume has increased 20.3% where enforcement is observable, nearly double the industry. With sustained enforcement, Vuse is poised to outperform. To date, Vuse holds leadership positions in 39 states and has achieved more than 56% market share in closed systems nationally. Under the revised FDA guidance, we have now expanded the Vuse proposition into four new flavor variants.
We are taking a phased distribution approach with select retail partners, supported by stronger contractual requirements for age verification, purchase limits, and clear adult-only messaging. These safeguards enhance our already very clear underage access prevention guidelines to ensure strong accountability as we bring flavored vapor products to market. We have also launched a campaign emphasizing the responsible marketing and selling of flavored vapor products. As enforcement develops, we believe Vuse is well positioned to capture a greater share of the legal vapor category, and we are committed to driving that growth responsibly. Together, Velo and Vuse demonstrate the strength and growing momentum of our new categories portfolio. With a strong innovation pipeline, we aim to sustain that momentum in pursuit of national market leadership. From flavors to formats, our global R&D capabilities and experience across markets offer a range of pipeline opportunities for the U.S.
Guided by consumer insight and supported by regulatory science, scale, and commercial capabilities, we are well positioned to leverage innovations in the U.S. over the medium term. Now, turning to combustibles. The macroeconomic environment remains challenging. Inflation, higher fuel costs, and weaker consumer sentiment continue to pressure consumer purchasing power. Against that backdrop, the overall decline in combustible volumes has moderated in 2026. However, affordability pressures are driving further downtrading. Deep discount volumes are up 16% versus the same period last year, making the low end an increasingly significant part of the category. Reynolds' first half volumes declined 5.2% versus the same period last year, partially benefiting from positive inventory movements. This resulted in first half combustible revenue increasing 5%, reflecting strong financial performance. While the inventory benefit will not repeat in the second half, we still expect to deliver year-on-year combustible revenue growth in 2026.
This reflects the strength of our brands and our rigorous approach to portfolio and revenue growth management. Competitive activity in the U.S. combustibles has intensified significantly. Since late 2025, competitors have increased promotional investment, expanded lower price offerings, and added distribution at the low end of the market. That activity began to affect our share in Q4 last year. We responded quickly with targeted investments, and since January, our total share has stabilized and increased by 25 basis points. Across our operating segments, excluding deep discount, where our portfolio is well established, share has increased 54 basis points and strengthened further in August. Competition has intensified, but our response is working. We have stabilized total share, strengthened our position across the portfolio, and remain confident in our ability to compete while protecting value. Combustibles will remain an important and sustainable source of value for our business.
Our confidence is grounded in the strength and geographic breadth of our portfolio, supported by proven revenue growth management and trade capabilities. Our scale and international footprint provide additional levers to support performance. Combined, these strengths give us the flexibility to respond as consumer and competitive dynamics evolve while competing profitably. We will continue to manage our combustible portfolio with discipline, delivering sustainable value while supporting investment in the categories of the future. The transformation of Reynolds is increasingly visible in our revenue mix. Combustibles provide substantial value and cash generation, while our smokeless brands position us to capture growth as consumer preferences evolve. Smokeless has grown from 16.8% of Reynolds revenue in 2022 to nearly 23% in the first half of 2026. That progress is supported by strong momentum in Velo together with our established oral portfolio. In vapor Vuse is positioned for continued growth as enforcement strengthens.
The result is a more balanced portfolio with growing contributions from categories that deliver value today and position us for future consumer demand. The evolution of the portfolio is also strengthening the quality of our financial delivery. U.S. gross margin increased from 68% in 2022 to 73% in 2025. That five percentage point expansion demonstrates our ability to grow margin as we transform the business. Looking ahead, we see a pathway to gross margin of 75%-78% by 2030. The result is a more balanced business with expanding margins supporting profitable growth. Our progress in new categories demonstrates how they are becoming an increasingly important growth and margin engine for Reynolds. New category gross margin increased from 47% in 2022 to 68% in 2025, a 21 percentage point improvement that substantially narrowed the gap to traditional categories.
That progress reflects increasing scale, stronger product economics, productivity, and rigorous commercial execution. As new categories continue to scale, their growth will increasingly support total portfolio margin. This is the model we are building, growth and margin expansion reinforcing one another. As the mix evolves, we expect Reynolds to remain a powerful engine of sustainable financial delivery for BAT. The results we have shared today are ultimately driven by our people and the culture they create across Reynolds. Our latest employee net promoter score reached 43, an improvement of 17 points from the previous survey, and 22 points above the U.S. benchmark. That tells us our employees see Reynolds as a great place to work and importantly, would recommend it to others. That engagement is reflected in how we are building the organization.
We are bringing in experienced leaders from across industries and discipline while investing in the growth and development of our existing talent. We are also building a strong early career pipeline and encouraging employees across the business to bring forward ideas that improve how we work and compete. Our most recent U.S. leadership effectiveness survey also showed strong results in areas that matter to a high-performing organization, including trust, clear expectations, and evidence-based decision making. Together, our people are turning strategy into action. Their engagement, leadership, and innovation are central to today's results and our confidence in winning in the U.S . in closing, let me reiterate why we are confident in Reynolds' position in the U.S. market. First, we have integrated capabilities that are difficult to replicate. U.S. scale and trade coverage, world-class science and R&D, digital capabilities, an international footprint, and operational excellence.
Second, we have a winning multi-category portfolio with strong brands across the nicotine market. Velo and Vuse are gaining ground in two of the most attractive growth segments, supported by an established portfolio that continues to generate sustainable value. Third, the financial opportunity is substantial. The U.S. developing segments revenue pool is projected to reach between $17 billion-$25 billion by 2030. Together, our brands, capabilities, and scale give us a strong foundation to capture a significant share of that growing value pool. The direction is clear. Reynolds is transforming and gaining momentum. We know success will require rigorous execution, responsible regulation, and continued investment, and we are prepared to deliver. Reynolds is the cornerstone of BAT's strategy, operating from a position of strength and focused on converting the U.S. opportunity into sustainable growth and long-term shareholder returns.
Tomorrow, you will visit the Reynolds Operation Center, or the ROC, as we call it, in Tobaccoville, North Carolina. The ROC is one of our four manufacturing sites and the heart of our U.S. operations. It is also the largest manufacturing facility in the BAT group, covering approximately 2 million square feet across a 635-acre campus. It is a true multi-category manufacturing hub. We look forward to welcoming you to the ROC, where you will meet some of approximately 1,800 employees who bring our products, our portfolio, and strategy to life every single day. During your visit, you will see firsthand the operational foundation behind Reynolds' transformation, performance, and long-term growth. I will now hand over to Fred Monteiro for an overview of AME. Thank you.
Hello, everyone. Good afternoon. My name is Fred Monteiro, Regional Director for the Americas and Europe region. Over my 27 years with BAT, I have had the opportunity to lead businesses across several markets and categories, including roles in general management, marketing, and new categories. I have also helped build successful business outside BAT in the e-commerce and media industries in my home country, Brazil. Today, you have heard from Tadeu, Luciano, and other colleagues about BAT's transformation and our path to higher quality growth. My role is to show how the AME region is helping lead that transformation. Across 85 markets, we are using the strength of our traditional business to accelerate new categories and drive our quality growth agenda. Let me start by putting the AME region into perspective. The Americas and Europe region is large, growing, and exciting.
It represents around 40% of total new category consumers worldwide and 40% of global nicotine industry revenues, which grew at a CAGR of 7% between 2022 and 2025. BAT is the volume share leader in combustibles in 23 markets in the region. Velo is the clear number one modern oral brand by value and volume share. In the vapor category, Vuse is the value share leader across key markets, and glo is showing early positive signs in premium heated products. This is also a highly diverse region. We manage a portfolio of markets at different stages of business transformation. Europe is more advanced, with new category consumer incidence approaching 10%. It provides insights from some of the world's most dynamic new category markets. Canada, for instance, at almost 6% incidence, shows how our transformation model can work in a more regulated environment.
Latin America represents a significant opportunity for future growth. This diversity is an advantage. It allows us to test, learn, and scale faster across markets. Consumer behavior is evolving, too. Today, one in every four new category consumers in AME use more than one product category, and this trend is accelerating. This is why BAT's multi-category portfolio matters, and this is why we continue to sharpen our investment focus, supporting the right categories in the right markets with rigorous prioritization. Our advantage is not only scale. It is also the ability to apply and replicate what works across the region. A natural question would be whether this advantage translates into performance. As you can see in the slide, we are strongly committed to delivering for today whilst transforming the business for the future.
Over the last four years, we have delivered an APFO growth CAGR of 9% in the region, and over the same period of time, new category revenues have grown at a CAGR of 17%. Behind that transformation, there is a simple but powerful growth model. As Anniek highlighted earlier, growth comes from understanding adult consumer preferences, developing powerful brands and products, and using the strength and scale of our combustible business. That scale provides broad market reach, strong customer relationships, and valuable consumer insights. In AME, we apply four connected capabilities, driving physical availability, mental availability, direct to consumer, and consumer engagement activities. Together, these capabilities support the growth of new category portfolio across different market and regulatory environments. Physical availability is a starting point. Across AME, we service more than 1.7 million retail points. One third of these customers are digitally connected to BAT through our B2B tools.
This gives us rich visibility and executional discipline whilst lowering our cost to serve. Reach alone is not enough. Growth comes from building brands that adult consumers would recognize and choose. We believe powerful brands are built into consumers' cultural repertoire and should be present where consumers' passion points are. Across the region, we participate in more than 800 local events and brand activation initiatives every year, supporting our new category brands. This is complemented by over 50 partnerships with recognized cross-category premium brands, including McLaren Racing and the Tomorrowland Festival. This helps ensure our brands are visible, culturally relevant, and differentiated. Our model also drives the conversion of brand awareness into product trial and adoption. One of our strengths is our ability to engage directly with adult consumers. We operate more than 1,200 flagship and experiential stores across the region.
These are brand hubs where adult consumers can discover our brands, receive guidance, immerse themselves in our brand world, build confidence in their category journey, and buy our products. We complement this with more than 6,000 multi-category brand ambassadors. Together, this ecosystem reaches around 9 million adult consumers through guided trial each year. Finally, we stay connected with adult consumers beyond the trial and purchase phase. Today, our first-party database includes more than 11 million consumers across AME. In key markets, around 3.5 million of our new category consumers participate in our consumer reward programs, which gives us relevant first-party insights and enables more personalized engagement. One of the strengths of this model is its flexibility. Across AME, we apply this 360-degree growth model, adapting to each market's maturity, category dynamics, regulatory environment, and consumer behavior. Let me walk you through a few quick examples.
Poland shows the model at scale in a dynamic multi-category market. Sweden demonstrates how the modern oral category can transform an entire market landscape. Canada is a great example of BAT's agility to transform in a highly regulated environment, and Latin America highlights the potential for future growth. Let's look at the key learnings from these different and important markets. Poland is a strong example of our multi-category model at scale. 44% of all adult nicotine consumers in Poland already use new category products regularly. Consequently, new categories command a higher share of total industry revenue in Poland than the European average. BAT is capturing that opportunity through an integrated omni-channel ecosystem. For example, through our direct-to-consumer model, we reach 70% of all adult nicotine consumers in Poland. Approximately 45% of them are registered in our database.
Two-thirds of consumers of BAT brands actively participate in our consumer reward programs, and together, this gives us powerful first-party data, personalized engagement, and a stronger pathway from product trial to brand retention. This also helps build stronger brands. Velo leads the modern oral category with a 75% volume share. In heated products, glo leads the value segment and continues to grow in the premium segment space. Both Velo and glo have built the strongest brand equity in Poland amongst adult consumers under 30. As a result, new categories have increased their share of BAT revenue in Poland from 43% in 2022 to 57% in 2025. Sweden shows what is possible in a more advanced transformation market, where modern oral is leading the shift towards smoke-free alternatives. Modern oral incidence in Sweden is currently at 10.2%, almost 2 x higher than combustibles incidence.
Daily average consumption is the highest in the world at 12 pouches per day versus a global average of four. These two data points demonstrate the headroom for further category growth worldwide. Today, smokeless products account for around three-quarters of total nicotine industry revenue in Sweden. In this highly developed market, Velo is the clear category leader. Velo is the number one brand in Sweden and larger than any other nicotine brand in the country, and continues to grow in terms of volume, value, and market share. This leadership has been built through rigorous execution, continuous innovation, and strong brand activation embedded in Scandinavian culture. Retail execution provides visibility and strong in-store presence. Innovation and consumer co-creation help keep the proposition relevant, while digital and offline activation strengthen brand awareness and consideration. Together, these capabilities support Velo's leadership position in the category.
Today, smokeless products account for 81% of BAT Sweden's revenue, demonstrating the scale of transformation already achieved in the country. This transformation is creating value. Smokeless categories deliver 1.2 x higher gross profit per unit than combustibles, while our total profit in Sweden has doubled since 2022. Sweden demonstrates an important point. In advanced transformation markets, BAT can convert category leadership into brand equity, premium economics, and accelerated value creation. Canada represents a different operating environment from Poland and Sweden. Here, we are advancing our smokeless opportunity through Zonnic, a nicotine replacement therapy offer licensed by Health Canada as a natural health product within a strict and unique regulatory framework. Since 2024, Zonnic has contributed to NRT category growth, which has increased 2.4 times over the period. Our approach combines distribution through pharmacies, consumer support programs, scientific engagement, brand advocacy, and consumer testimonials.
Together, these capabilities create a model built on regulatory compliance and scientific credibility. Today, Zonnic holds a 54.9% value share in the category, with volumes that continue to grow sequentially. It is also delivering attractive economics, with gross profit per unit 4.6 x higher than combustibles. Canada shows that even in a highly regulated environment, our disciplined and consumer-focused approach can accelerate profitable growth in our smokeless business. Latin America could represent the region's largest new category future growth opportunity, where BAT already has the scale, infrastructure, and commercial capabilities to capture that opportunity as the regulatory landscape evolves. As it starts to evolve, BAT is well-positioned. Across Latin America, we have 78% retail share coverage and a 53% combustibles volume share. In Brazil, the largest market in the region, our combustibles volume share is 70%.
Importantly, our commercial ecosystem is already well advanced into a more digital, more efficient, and more scalable model. Today, 61% of our total orders are placed through our connected B2B systems, with customer satisfaction rates at 88%. Retailer reward programs cover 75% of the BAT volume, and retail staff advocacy programs deliver more than 2 percentage points of market share improvement where deployed. Data-driven investment tools improve returns by approximately 40%. These capabilities matter because they prepare the region for further scale. As new categories unlock in some key markets, we can already see results. Velo holds 60% volume share in Colombia and 56% volume share in strategic key accounts in Mexico. In vapor, we have 69% value share in Chile through Vuse. Latin America, therefore, represents a significant long-term opportunity supported by scale, infrastructure, commercial capabilities that are already in place.
The impact of new categories in our business is already visible across the broader region. Since 2022, we have improved our new categories bottom line performance by approximately half a billion GBP. In markets where we are present, new categories have increased their share of revenue from 17% in 2022 to 25% in 2025. Today, 22 markets already exceed that 25% mark, including Sweden, U.K., Poland, France, Norway, and Austria, amongst others. New categories are no longer just a future opportunity. They are already shaping the revenue mix across AME today. In AME, we are not just growing new categories, we are improving the quality of our portfolio, strengthening our profitability, and building a more balanced platform for long-term value creation. Now let me turn from markets to categories, and let me start with Modern Oral, the key driver of new category growth in AME.
BAT has established a strong leading position in Modern Oral across AME. Today, we hold a 63.6% volume share, around seven times larger than the nearest competitor. But this is not only leadership in scale. Our indexed value share is around 10 x that of the next competitor, demonstrating the quality of our position. And importantly, around 70% of consumers entering the Modern Oral category choose BAT brands. And that leadership extends across the region, as you can see by our share in key markets on the slide. The markets shown here are part of a much broader footprint, with our Modern Oral portfolio now present in 42 markets across AME. Across that footprint, Velo has established the number one brand equity position in most of our markets, supported by premium positioning and continuous innovation.
In the Nordics, our leadership has expanded beyond Modern Oral into the Total Oral space, with BAT share of Total Oral increasing from 26.7% in 2023 to 33.9% today. And importantly, this is translating to stronger financial delivery. Modern Oral, including NRT, revenues in the region have grown 2.3 x since 2022, while delivering around 70% gross profit in 2025. Together, these results demonstrate leadership that is broad, repeatable, and financially attractive. And if Modern Oral demonstrates our ability to build category leadership, Vapor demonstrates our ability to compete in one of the world's most dynamic categories. Vuse is the value share leader across AME with 32.3% share in key markets, more than double the nearest competitor. That leadership is built on a distinctive high-quality brand proposition, consistent execution, and consumer-relevant innovation like Vuse Ultra, as you can see in the slide. Profitability in Vapor is also improving.
Since 2022, Vapor category contribution in AME has increased by GBP 133 million. We are strengthening the brand, deepening consumer engagement, and translating leadership into sustainable value creation as we focus on selected markets. The same logic now applies to heated products, where glo Hilo is gradually opening up BAT's opportunity into the premium profit pool. We already have a 64% volume share in the heated products value segment, but around 81% of the industry revenues sit in the premium space. glo Hilo gives us a platform to compete where the heated products value pool is concentrated. Since launch, more than 20 million adult consumers have been exposed to glo Hilo across our launch markets. More than half of Hilo's source of business comes from combustibles and other premium heated product consumers, with trial to purchase conversion around 61%.
We are deploying a highly selective and focused investment approach across a small number of priority markets. In these selected geographies, glo Hilo has achieved an average segment share of 3.6%, despite being in the market for less than a year. Underpinning our transformation is the strength of our combustibles business. As Emma highlighted earlier, combustibles remain a critical value engine for BAT. In AME, the combustibles category is resilient, with incidents broadly stable, moving from 21.2 in 2022 to 20.2 in 2025. We are actively improving our combustibles portfolio, adapting brands, formats, and price architectures to consumer preferences, especially as inflation and consumer disposable incomes are stressed. Today, BAT is the volume share leader of the combustibles categories in 23 markets in the region and is gaining share across key markets including Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, and Poland, amongst others.
We are strengthening our execution in priority markets with new launches into growing segments. Together, a resilient combustibles business and a growing new category portfolio are creating a stronger, more balanced, and more valuable business for AME, which brings me to the summary of the AME story. Let me leave you with three messages. First, we have a proven transformation model, a scalable approach that works across categories and markets. Second, this is delivering results. Category leadership in modern oral and vapor, early signs of progress in premium heated products, and a resilient combustibles business. Since 2022, we have improved new categories bottom-line performance by approximately half a billion pounds. Third, our transformation is already material. New categories now represent around 25% of our total revenue in the region, with a clear ambition to reach 50% by 2035.
We are pursuing that ambition from a position of strength with focus and discipline. The AME region is not only just participating in BAT's transformation, AME is helping lead it. Thank you very much. I will now hand over to Pascale for an overview of the APMEA region. Thank you.
Hello everyone. My name is Pascale, and I am here to talk about Asia, Pacific, Middle East, and Africa. I have been in consumer goods for over two decades, driving growth and transformation in most continents and in different categories. Since joining as regional director a year ago, my focus has been very clear, making APMEA structurally reshaped for growth. Pivoting the region to consumer-centric volume-led growth to win in the marketplace, so we become a significant contributor to the BAT algorithm. We were the growth engine of BAT years ago. We have not been in recent years, and today I will share a plan how we will become one again. The opportunity is big. We have already made good progress this year, and we are confident that our model is working, is accelerating, and is repeatable across countries. Let me start by setting the scene.
Home to many of the world's largest and fastest-growing cities and rising consumer spending, Asia, Pacific, Middle East, and Africa is structurally positioned for growth. The region is large and already accounts for 49% of the total nicotine consumers, 46% of the volume, and 27% of the revenue. Yet only 18% of BAT's group revenue. Despite past headwinds, we are today a stronger, more focused, and a simpler organization. In combustibles, we hold leadership positions in 28 markets, and we see significant growth opportunities across both emerging and developed economies. We are also excited about the potential of modern oral. Currently the fastest-growing nicotine category globally, where BAT is holding volume share category leadership. And we are turning the tide on HP through a focused and sustainable investment model. 2026 is a year where we have been rebuilding the foundation for growth.
As you know, 2025 was an extremely difficult year driven by Australia and Bangladesh fiscal and regulatory challenges, which resulted in a significant erosion of duty paid combustible volumes. But the important thing is that we have been making good progress, and we are now seeing an acceleration in the second half driven by volume growth in all three categories. We have a clear ambition and growth plan. Our ambition is to become the fastest-growing total nicotine player in APMEA. At the core of our plan is a clear strategic pivot to consumer-centric volume-led growth, which is our key overriding priority. We will do so by focusing on the fundamentals, sharper execution, and targeted investments. At the same time, we are building deliberately a multi-category execution model to win in combustibles and new categories, using the strength of both and accelerating modern oral further in attractive markets.
Taken together, this will position us to deliver sustained midterm top and bottom line delivery, growing volume ahead of the market with solid profitability, contributing to the overall group algorithm. And we have strong reasons to believe in the region's future. As I said, the opportunity is big and it is across categories. The nicotine category continues to grow both in combustibles and in new categories with increasing poly- usage. Combustibles remain resilient, while modern oral and heated products each account for 40% of the region's projected new category growth, with heated products growing at a slower pace following the excise harmonization in Japan. And as we have seen in other, more established new category markets, we expect to see these numbers evolve over time with more consumers progressing towards new categories poly-use. So taken together, we see significant opportunities across multi-categories.
Our APMEA growth plan is a fundamental pivot back to consumer-centric volume-led growth by transforming how we win to become the fastest growing total nicotine player in APMEA by 2030. It has three key principles at its core. First of all, it is about focusing our resources behind fewer markets, prioritizing high-impact growth opportunities where we can win. Second, we need to shift to consumer moments-led value creation to meet evolving consumer preferences, and we can best capture those with a multi-category portfolio. This is a shift from a more internally-oriented culture in the region to becoming much more consumer-centric. Third, to succeed, this requires stronger market focus and accountability.
Therefore, we are furthering empowering our market leaders to adapt our go-to market approach, ensuring that we are closer to consumers, more responsive to market dynamics, whilst building capabilities to grow our brands at scale through our growth flywheel, as shown by Anniek. Importantly, and proudly, this plan was created bottom up by regional leaders together with the leaders of the global team, ensuring strong ownership, alignment, and collaboration in a much more simplified and focused organization. At the heart of our transformation is our growth flywheel, which is all about lifting the execution in the markets. We believe that winning starts with knowing the consumer better than anyone else and meet their preferences across the demand moments with a competitive multi-category portfolio and scaling that all through the growth flywheel.
In the next section, I will share how we deploy this model in Japan, our biggest developed market in APMEA, and then in Pakistan, our blueprint for multi-category growth in emerging markets. I am happy to say we are back to winning in Japan, one of the most competitive markets in the world, through multi-category execution at scale. The proof is in the numbers. Growing total nicotine share by half a percentage point in each one. Combustibles, heated products, and modern oral are all pulling in the same direction. This is what multi-category at scale looks like, with 57% of our revenue already coming from smokeless products. It is all about reaching and engaging consumers in relevant ways, always connected, wherever, whenever. It is about building brands immersed in culture with locally relevant products and superior sensorials. Brands that are experiential, demand moment-led, and digitally integrate.
This is what is behind the success of Japan, combined with perfect stores. Because today, we believe that it is more than ever important to have unmissable activation in store. When I joined BAT, I saw a significant opportunity to improve our execution. In my last visit to Japan, I was so proud to see the breakthrough in convenience stores and in new channels through retail partnerships, which is thanks to the great work of our team over there. Having lived and worked in Japan for a number of years, you only get this when you are demonstrating you have a category vision and you are delivering on the execution. The model is working, and it is also working in emerging markets, with Pakistan leading the way. Pakistan is a true powerhouse, and it has become the blueprint for multi-category growth in emerging markets, driven by two engines.
Sustained combustible growth, with revenues up 13% since 2023, reaching 80% volume share with Pall Mall, the leading brand in the market. New category acceleration, with Velo growing 43% in revenue. Now the number one oral brand in the market, with the highest brand equity globally and amazing consumer reach. We see significant opportunities for the many more Pakistan-like markets in our portfolio, using all of that combustible scale to drive NC adoption. In Pakistan, we are also obsessed about going deeper in culture, meeting consumers where they are, whilst using all of that combustible scale in trade to drive new category adoption and converting all of that cultural energy into commercial execution. To build new categories like Modern Oral, you not only need to be present in store, you have to be part of the conversation and scale that community to community.
With Velo Sound Station, we are driving new ways of reach and demand generation at scale, going from mega key opinion leaders to now micro-influencers to get to that community with user-generated content powered by AI. Partnerships that go beyond communication are now also inspiring limited product editions in Modern Oral. Let's now go deeper into the categories. As you have heard from Emma, to grow APMEA, winning in combustibles is essential. So we are ruthlessly focusing and investing where the growth is and where we can win. We are addressing evolving consumer preferences and changes to market dynamics by capturing the opportunities in the growing value-for-money segment. Secondly, expanding our flavor portfolio with superior sensorials whilst fighting against illicit to claw back volume. All this is expected to strengthen our leadership position and enable us to drive consistent growth again.
This is essential for us as it is also going to fuel our Modern Oral acceleration. Talking Modern Oral, we already have clear leadership in Modern Oral in the region. Velo is the number one brand with a market share of 76%, which is over three times the share of the runner-up competitor, driving strong year-on-year momentum. Hey, and we are just scratching the surface. We are obsessed with growing our Modern Oral business and unlocking new white space opportunities. We are confident that we have an algorithm that works. We seed, we invest, and we scale through digital and physical availability, and going deeper in culture. The model is working, and we estimate the market to significantly grow by 2023. On top of winning in combustibles and accelerating Modern Oral, we are taking a targeted approach to profitable growth in HP.
Our strategy here is very clear, which is to create incremental value in the number one category value pool in the region by focusing on the top three markets. And we have started to turn the tide with glo Hilo supporting overall glo performance and brand strength now stable at 14% volume share of category and growing to 3.5% volume share in the premium segment in Japan, and reaching 41% volume share in Kazakhstan with very strong momentum year to date. So in summary, the big message I want to leave you with is that APMEA is structurally reshaped for growth. We are confident in executing our strategy to drive consumer-centric, volume-led growth through the interventions we are making across the portfolio and operating model.
We expect to further drive sequential performance recovery, accelerating our new category revenue contribution, and returning the region to volume and top-line growth in 2027, building back to the group algorithm in 2028. Our model to grow our brands at scale across categories is working, and it is working in both developed and emerging markets. It is a repeatable model that will roll out across all of our priority markets to become the fastest-growing total nicotine player in the region and become BAT's growth engine again. Thank you. We will now have a short break for coffee. We will meet again in the auditorium at 4:20 P.M. for our final presentations. Thank you so much.
Good afternoon, everyone. It is a pleasure to be with you at our Capital Markets Day. As a brief introduction, I am Johan Vandermeulen, and I have been with the group for more than 30 years. Throughout my career, I have held different leadership roles across the business, combining commercial, operational, and financial accountability in both emerging and developed markets. I joined the management board in 2014 and became Chief Operating Officer in 2023. Earlier, you heard how we are sharpening our strategic choices, strengthening execution, and building the capabilities required to deliver sustainable growth. I want to bring those elements together and demonstrate how they translate into sustainable shareholder returns. The central message is straightforward. We are on track to deliver our growth algorithm supported by quality revenue growth, improving profitability, strong cash generation, and disciplined capital allocation.
Critically, we intend to deliver that algorithm in a way that balances investment in our transformation with attractive and sustainable cash returns to our shareholders. Let me start with the progress we have made since our last Capital Markets Day. Our journey has moved through three deliberate phases. In 2024, our focus was on targeted investment. We strengthened the U.S. portfolio and execution, enhanced our R&D ecosystem to support faster and more agile innovation, and continued to improve our new category profitability. In 2025, that investment began to translate into progressive improvement. The U.S. returned to growth. Velo+ delivered strongly, reaching profitability within one year of launch, and we established glo Hilo and Vuse Ultra in the premium segments. In 2026, our focus is to return to grow into our algorithm.
We expect strong U.S. revenue and profit growth, mid-teens new category revenue growth driven by modern oral, and continued improvement in our new category profitability. Throughout this investment and transition period, sharper execution has supported strong cash generation. This has enabled progressive dividends and sustainable share buybacks while supporting our return to the targeted leverage corridor. Together, this is building a strong track record of delivery. What our journey has demonstrated is that deliberate choices create value. Choices about how we prioritize, where we invest, and where we allocate our capital. At the heart of those choices is a simple objective, sustainable shareholder returns driven by quality growth that improves profitability, generates strong cash flows, and gives us the flexibility to invest in our transformation whilst delivering attractive shareholder returns. Together, these are the foundations of long-term shareholder value creation.
It all starts with making the right choices in the right places. That means being as deliberate about where we do not invest as where we do invest. We have sharpened our heated product strategy around the largest profit pools, reduced investment in vapor markets where the regulatory environment does not support sustainable returns, and exited markets where we do not see a compelling long-term growth opportunity. We will continue to make these choices to allow us to concentrate resources behind the opportunities with the strongest potential for sustainable returns. One of BAT's greatest strengths is the breadth and diversity of our footprint. We do not take a one size fits all approach. We are increasingly deliberate in how we allocate resources and how we position each region to win.
In the U.S., we are investing to strengthen our position in the world's largest nicotine value pool, building on the strong momentum across both combustibles and new categories. In AME, we are leveraging our multi-category model and leading the smokeless transformation. In APMEA, we are resetting performance and concentrating investment behind the categories and markets with the strongest long-term growth opportunities. What links these regions together is excellence in execution. This means making targeted choices, allocating resources where sustainable returns are the greatest, and finally, by leveraging our global scale while remaining locally relevant. Our regional strengths are complemented by a portfolio in which each category has a distinct role to play. As Luciano, Emma, and Anniek demonstrated earlier, we are all well-positioned to win with our multi-category portfolio. Our recent performance demonstrates the quality growth momentum that we are building across the portfolio.
Our investments in combustibles are working. We have delivered resilient performances with improving revenue, gross profit, and contribution. This is driven by our extensive global footprint, strong brand portfolio, and sharper execution. Alongside the resilience in combustibles, new categories are becoming an increasingly meaningful contributor to the group's growth. The progress shown here reflects the momentum that we are building across the business. Revenue growth is accelerating, gross profit is increasing, and the contribution margin is expanding. Most importantly, growth is increasingly translating into profitability. This improving performance reinforces our confidence in the choices we have made and in the opportunity for sustainable growth beyond 2026. The value of our multi-category model is that each category plays a distinct role in delivering our group algorithm. In modern oral, we have the fastest growing brand in the fastest growing new category.
Velo is growing strongly in the U.S., holds clear leadership positions in AME, and continues to expand in APMEA. Importantly, it combines attractive growth with attractive economics, making it one of the strongest value creation opportunities in our portfolio. In vapor, momentum is positive and the portfolio is continuing to premiumize. The U.S. has returned to growth and remains the largest contributor in this category. Outside the U.S., our enhanced portfolio is improving our ability to compete across key consumer segments, which fuels Vuse strengthening our premium position. In heated products, we are building glo Hilo in premium and are enhancing the value proposition with Hyper pro+ as we reposition the business for targeted growth. As these categories continue to scale, we expect new categories to deliver around mid-teens revenue through to 2030. Combustibles will continue to power our transformation.
While performance may vary from year to year as we navigate regulatory and market dynamics, we remain confident in delivering sustainable revenue growth of 1%-2% on average to 2030. Together, the strengths of our multi-category portfolio give us confidence in our ability to deliver 3%-5% group revenue growth. Gross profit continues to increase across the portfolio. Combustibles continue to fund our transformation with resilient margins supported by sharper execution, stronger revenue growth management, and continued productivity benefits. New categories are becoming an increasingly meaningful contributor through gross profit. Importantly, as scale builds, the margin gap continues to close. With new category margins already ahead of combustibles in more established markets. Productivity remains a significant opportunity. Having delivered GBP 1.2 billion of savings between 2023 and 2025, we expect a further GBP 2 billion by 2030.
Together, resilient combustibles, improving new category economics, and continued productivity savings all give us confidence in our ability to continue growing gross profit over time. As new categories scale further, we expect them to contribute an increasing proportion of future gross profit growth. While the path will not be linear, year-on-year, reflecting our investment choices, the direction of travel is clear. We have already reached an important inflection point in new categories, moving from an investment period to building scale and generating meaningful contribution. Modern oral and vapor are already profitable at scale. In heated products, 2026 represents the peak investment year before returns improve thereafter. Together with targeted investment behind our strongest opportunities, this will support further acceleration in new category contribution. As scale continues to build and economics continue to strengthen, we expect new category contribution margin to increase to at least 30% by 2030.
We will therefore continue to invest behind innovation in the markets where we see the strongest combination of growth, contribution, and returns. Bringing these elements together, quality growth, improving economics, and increasing category contribution provide the foundations for sustainable profit growth. We have progressively strengthened profit delivery since 2024 and expect to return to the lower end of our 4%-6% growth algorithm in 2026. This growth is supported by better AI-enabled decisions and improving our new category mix. It is reinforced by a leaner cost base, simpler processes, and greater use of strategic partnerships. It is underpinned by sharper execution focusing on the largest value pools and leveraging our excellent capabilities and world-class talent. Fit2Win further strengthens this pathway, creating a leaner, faster, and more agile BAT through structural simplifications, cost optimizations, and route to market modernizations.
Together, these drivers give us confidence in our ability to deliver sustainable adjusted profit from operations ahead of the top-line growth. Our growth ambition is sustainable adjusted diluted EPS growth of 5%-8%. Beyond APFO growth, we expect 1-2 percentage points of additional EPS accretion over time, reflecting a sustainable share buyback, net finance cost optimization as we continue to reduce debt over time, a robust tax strategy, and our underlying associates' performance. Historically, these factors have consistently enhanced EPS growth, contributing more than 1 percentage point annually in recent years. For 2026, we expect these drivers to contribute more than 2 percentage points. We are not dependent on any single lever. The model combines operating growth with disciplined financing and capital allocation to deliver sustainable growth in earnings per share. Cash generation remains the foundation of our capital allocation framework.
We have a strong record with cash conversion of around 100% for six consecutive years. Our confidence in the growth algorithm is underpinned by strong cash generation. We expect to generate more than GBP 50 billion of free cash flow between 2024 and 2030. 2025 and 2026 have been impacted by significant one-off cash outflows relating to the double CAA settlement and our Fit2Win program. Beyond these items, the underlying cash-generating capability of the business becomes increasingly evident. We are confident in our ability to generate around GBP 8 billion of free cash flow annually through to 2030, supporting our cumulative ambition of more than GBP 50 billion. That delivery will be supported by profit expansion, disciplined capital expenditure, greater automation and AI-enabled analytics, stronger working capital management, and last but not least, an embedded focus on cash across every function.
This gives us the flexibility to invest in the business, strengthen the balance sheet, and deliver attractive shareholder returns. Our cash generation allows us to balance our capital allocation priorities. Since 2021, we have made significant progress in reducing our leverage whilst returning nearly GBP 36 billion to our shareholders. First, we have strengthened the balance sheet by reducing gross debt by GBP 5 billion since 2021. That progress has increased our financial flexibility and supports the delivery of our leverage commitments. While leverage in 2025 was affected by the accounting treatment for Canada, we remain confident in returning to our targeted range of 2x - 2.5 x by year-end. Secondly, we have increased the dividend in sterling terms for 27 consecutive years. By year-end, we expect to have repurchased GBP 3.1 billion worth of shares since 2024. We remain committed to a progressive dividend and sustainable share buybacks.
That financial flexibility gives us greater choice in how we allocate capital going forward. Our capital allocation priorities are clear and sequenced. It starts with strong cash generation, providing the capacity to invest in our transformation and strengthens the long-term growth of the business. We will continue to optimize our portfolio by actively reviewing our footprint and reallocate capital towards the strongest value creation opportunities. Within that framework, we remain committed to a progressive dividend. We will operate within our target leverage corridor and maintain a sustainable share buyback. With a stronger balance sheet, we can selectively assess bolt-on opportunities where they accelerate our transformation and create shareholder value. Above all, we remain focused and disciplined, ensuring that we are investing for growth, maintaining financial strength, and delivering shareholder returns that are sustainable.
That discipline is not only reflected in how we allocate capital, it is also embedded in how management is measured and rewarded. Our long-term incentive plan is directly aligned with our algorithm and the outcomes that drive shareholder value creation. Relative TSR and EPS growth, which accounts for 45% of the total weighting, provides a clear link between management rewards and shareholder returns. Smokeless revenue and new categories contribution margins ensure we remain focused on both growth and profitable transformation. Strong cash conversion and improving returns on capital reinforce a disciplined approach to capital allocation and value creation. The measures reflect our strategy, the incentives reinforce execution, and the outcome is sustainable shareholder value creation. Overall, these measures reinforce the accountability to deliver the commitments we have set out today.
In summary, we are building a stronger business driven by quality growth, improved profitability, strong cash generation, and disciplined capital allocation. This gives us the confidence in our ability to deliver our growth algorithm, and most importantly, the delivery of sustainable shareholder returns. Thank you very much. I would like to invite Victoria to the stage for our final Q&A.
This afternoon we have heard about shifting behavior for tobacco harm reduction. We have had insights from each of our regions and our focus on driving a sustainable shareholder return. We will now move to the second Q&A session of the day, where you will have the opportunity to ask questions from our afternoon speakers. If you would like to ask a question, please raise your hand and someone will bring a microphone to you. As before, if you could say your name and your institution and ask one question at a time, we would appreciate it. As a reminder, dinner tonight will be at Reynolda House, the former family home of the Reynolds family. Coaches will leave outside the Kimpton Hotel at the front at 18:20.
I would now like to welcome back on stage all of our afternoon speakers, and Jeff Raborn, who is General Counsel Reynolds American, Executive Vice President of Law and External Affairs. Okay. I think we have microphones at the ready. Andrei at the back.
Hi, good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for today's presentations. It is Andrei Andon-Ionita from Jefferies here. It was great to hear that U.S. Combustibles value share has been robust despite the increased activity you have been seeing in deep discounts. Could you tell us a bit more about the specific portfolio investments you have made to ensure this is the case, and also how you are planning to balance the premium portfolio with the scale-ups of Camel Craft and Doral to avoid value cannibalization in U.S. Combustibles?
David, I think that is for you.
Thank you, Andrei. It is working? Yeah. We have seen an increase in discounting in the market since last year. It started last year, really. It has continued. The deep discount growth that we have seen, I mentioned it in the presentation, I think 16%, I said. It is a mixture of things. Some of that was distribution expansion late last year and early this year. The downtrading in the market is probably exacerbated by the macros, the general economic situation. Look, we have obviously responded to that. We made a lot of changes in 2024 going into 2025 to reset the business. A lot of that is still valid in the investments that we made across the portfolio and also in the trade, rebuilding the team and obviously expanding the contracts and so on. That is a big part of how the Reynolds Combustible model works.
We have had to adjust some of those things as the course of the year went on, and you saw that in the share. We took a bit of a dip in Q4 and into January with I would say unusually large discounting activity going on. At that point, it was not solely deep discount. It was elsewhere. And you saw how the portfolio responded. Now, in terms of what we expect deep discount this year going into next year, I think it will continue to grow. The downtrending in the market is obviously being driven by those factors I mentioned. It is manageable. The important thing to remember is we have what is called EDLP contracts. So, in case not everybody is aware of what they are, it is Everyday Low Price.
We will ensure in those outlets that we have the most affordable price offer, together with investment across the rest of the portfolio. That covers over 60% of industry volume. So that is a large part of the trade model that we have that allows us the flexibility to manage the relationship between the different brands within our portfolio. We have five investment brands. They are segmented across the country. We have a very sophisticated revenue growth management capability in the U.S. So we are using that all the time. But the fact that 60% of the volumes in the industry are covered by EDLP. What you are really talking about outside of EDLP when it comes to deep discount, which is about 23% of the volume now, is about 4% of the total industry’s revenue and 2% of the industry’s gross margin. So our approach will continue to be selective.
We obviously will have to manage this for the time being. We expect it to grow. We have the brands, we have the capabilities, and we have our position in the market that would allow us to address what we anticipate the current trends continuing. We will continue to address them selectively. Because the role of cigarettes or combustibles in Reynolds is sustainable value. And we will continue to manage it accordingly.
Faham.
Thank you. Faham Baig, UBS. Two mini questions if it is okay, Victoria. I think it is probably for David as well. The first one is how do you assess the potential of the heated tobacco category in the U.S. with the potential upcoming launch of a competitor product? And do you have anything in the pipeline that you may look to launch? And the second question, if I read the slide correctly, you forecast industry value for modern oral in the U.S. by 2030 of $5 billion-$10 billion. The range is quite wide. I guess, what is the difference for the category getting to the top versus the bottom in that timeframe? Thank you.
Yeah, the range is quite wide. For modern oral, it really hinges upon how big is big and how fast. So how much incidence growth do we see? How much ADC growth do we see? How much daily usage do we see? How much does that poly-use come down? It is about 87% of the category is poly-use. It is starting to decline now. The big unknown on that is really what is likely to change that? Now, part of the answer to it is we have witnessed it in the last 18 months. When significantly better products appear, you start to see the incidence and the ADC moving. And as today I mentioned, this has a massive compound effect going forward. Now, we see with the May guidance that not just ourselves, but other companies can bring new differentiated products to Velo Max has just arrived.
All these things will give an answer to us pretty soon about can we get to the top end of the range for modern oral by 2030 or the lower end of the range? So it is really those dynamics. I think the U.S. market has been restricted for some time in the normal development of this category that we see in Europe and so on. I am not suggesting the U.S. gets to Scandinavian levels, but I think with the products that are coming to market now, including Velo+ recently, I can see that developing rapidly as you see in Europe. Okay? So that really defines that range. The other question was on heated products. Right? This is something that we obviously talk about and investigate a lot. It is a big market. You would expect an opportunity in this market for a variety of products.
Certainly we have, as you know from the rest of the group, we have access to the latest products. We have PMTAs associated with those products, either in place or in development for submission very soon. The question really is where is there another market like the U.S. in the world? Because the cigarette tar in the U.S. is quite high. Average is about 18. Europe is capped at 10. Asia, as we know, tends to be dominated by light cigarettes.
That's a bit of an outlier. We have an enormous vapor market. Sadly, a lot of it is illicit, 70% of it is. But it's very well established here in the U.S. And now we've got a strongly growing modern oral segment. We obviously, with the opportunities we have to see what is the optimum product to bring in that space, there's some big question marks. Now, we need to be ready, we need to be prepared. But I think we will also see some convergence between what we call heated products today and what we call vapor today. I think that was alluded to in Anneik's presentation earlier. So I think there's multiple options, assuming that that is a significant growth opportunity within the U.S. market. So we'll remain vigilant. We'll get ready. But I think the opportunities are not quite as binary as they perhaps were.
Can I add something, too? I know that some of you love models. Just to be clear. Because 5 - 10 is a big range. What I showed here was GBP 7 billion. So I spoke about modern oral reaching out to 2030, GBP 11 billion. This coming from GBP 4 billion. The GBP 4 billion that I was referring is to 2025, GBP 2.5 billion in the U.S., moving our way to GBP 7 billion.
In reality, the range is 5 - 10. And the other GBP 1.5 billion outside the U.S. going to another GBP 4 billion, adding to GBP 11 billion. So that's the first point, because I know that some of you all love models. The second one, and is about linking to the question of Andrei, as much temptation we should have around combustible. The role of combustible here in Reynolds is to generate the cash.
Like David said, we want to sustain the value. The growth is not coming from combustible. It is not. The growth is coming from these engines of growth. The GBP 5 billion-GBP 10 billion that we refer to in modern oral. We spoke about illicit vapor account to another GBP 7 billion, not just to mention the growth in vapor. We are really well positioned to grow, to making roads in that boat. That is where the growth will come from. We are going to navigate through the combustible, obviously is important, because a lot of cash we generate, and we use that to transform the business. The growth is not from the combustible side.
Richard.
Thank you very much. Richard Felton from Goldman Sachs. I have got a two-parter on the U.S. and the FDA. I suppose one of the criticisms of the PMTA process in recent years is that it has been a bit slow and it has been an obstacle to bringing innovation to the market. Maybe more recently, there are some signs of that changing with shifts in enforcement priorities. I noted that the new head of the CTP made some fairly constructive comments at GTNF a couple of weeks ago. Part one of the question is, do you think there is a chance of a more substantive shift in how the FDA and the PMTA process operates? Part two, if that shift does occur, how much does that shift the opportunity set for BAT in the U.S., and to what extent is that reflected in your guidance? Thank you.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think you are referencing the May 8th guidance that came out. That was absolutely a positive, what we would consider interim step to potentially a more fulsome fix to the process. You are right, it has been a slow process. That is one of the reasons for the litigation that has been recently filed, which is we need to fix the delay in getting applications through that process. Under the act, the Tobacco Control Act, it should be 180 days. You have applications that have been pending for over five years. That needs to be fixed. Was a recent report from The Wall Street Journal last week that FDA put out a press release late yesterday that just came across the transom today, is that they are going to look at that rule, that that litigation has been filed about, and potentially work to fix that process.
There are many green shoots out there for us to think about and engage on, and obviously we welcome that. The process, what needs to happen is multifold, but primarily twofold, which is, one, you need enforcement of the rules. What are those rules? You need clarity around those rules, and you need an access, a pathway to the market. You cannot have a rational, regulated environment without both of those. You cannot have one or the other. You need both of those. What happens is, the May 8th guidance, for instance, I think what you will see in the marketplace now is now that responsible manufacturers have access to the market, and that legal, responsible American retailers have access to those products. You will see some demand shift from illicit products to those legal products. In turn, that will shrink the demand.
The law enforcement efforts to enforce should it be more effective, which should shrink that demand and shift that demand to legal retailers. It is the virtuous circle that when you have a rationally regulated environment, you have government regulation combined with marketplace regulation, and you end up in a very positive space in that regard. We like what we are hearing. We have a long way to go. We need more enforcement. We need more access. We need those pathways. We need product standards. But good signs right now. On the other part, Tadeu?
I can take your question on. Look, obviously, the U.S. is the driver behind most of our progress around the new categories. What we are estimating in our projection is 30% enforcement on vapor. We talk a lot about enforcement coming from the states, federal level, but the culprit of the illegality that exists today in vaping in the U.S. is actually the lack of level playing field. If you really have a more equilibrium around the level playing field, we will be probably in a position to over-deliver around the 30% margin contribution for new categories. I think the expression at least has a lot to do with this possibility. Because the combination of Reynolds with the local capabilities that we have in the U.S., with the backing of BAT, with the strong pipeline that you have seen today, is quite powerful.
If you have a possibility to deploy that pipeline of products in the U.S., which would be a normal request, a sensible one. Because at the end, we are in the U.S., and the U.S. consumer shouldn't be using a device like Vuse of 10 years old. Shouldn't be the case. They should be using the latest device. If you can have that, I feel very good about this in the future. And that at least 30% is exactly counting with this potential possibility as well.
Owen, in the middle.
Thank you. Just on the new category guidance, mid-teens growth, and you did give a number of GBP 4.3 billion in pouches in 2030. That would imply, if my math is correct, vape and heated growing by 4%. Assuming you are getting 30% enforcement on vape in the U.S., the balance there for heated does not look that great. I was just wondering if you would give some commentary around what that guidance implies for vape and heated into 2030.
I thought they like models, though. You want some help in the spreadsheet. Look, at the end of the day, the engine of growth for us will be modern oral. That is very obvious, no? Not just the revenue side, the contribution side, because modern oral is a rather, and I mentioned this in some interactions before, we are right above 30% in a number of markets with modern oral per se. I would say to you, I am already above 30% category contribution if I was just referring to modern oral. Obviously, we have a very also strong vapor category contribution here in the U.S., which is set to grow, given the latest developments. We have a turnaround in terms of profitability in the HP. We do not disclose margins by category, but obviously vapor and modern oral are already in a very positive territory.
HP has been a loss-making for us. We are saying clearly that this will turn around from 2027 onwards. The way that we will be addressing is more into this inhalation space, not necessarily by category, because like David, just to answer the question around the potential HP response from our side in the U.S., we see more and more interactions between heated users and vapor users. So we are not really trying to see precise about by category because we have to see how this dynamic pans out over time. We expect overall to grow top line and to grow bottom line. That will be supportive for the algorithm. But I think that the dynamic of this will depend a lot in terms of how much progress we can make here in the U.S. It comes back to the question before.
Also how those new innovations will succeed in the market. Anniek just showed the first frontier between vapor and HP. You saw some of that in the exhibition today. So there is a lot of optionality for BAT, let us put it that way. That is why we do not want to be precise by category. But we feel very assertive about the possibility to get where we need to be in terms of those numbers that we discussed with you.
Thank you.
Damian, over here.
Thank you. Damian McNeela at Deutsche Bank. We have talked about the positive progress that the U.S. has made on a regulatory front. How do you assess the political risks of that being reversed if there is a change in administration?
Well, I think you won't have a change of administration until 2029 at the earliest. I know a lot of people are focused on the midterms, but the administration will be there until January of 2029. And of course, who knows what that election will bring us at that point. But if FDA is successful now, based on their press release of last night, are able to get a finalized rule in place over the next couple of years, which should be possible, especially with the speed at which folks are acting right now, then that rule will be in place for a number of years. FDA can always redo a rule, just like they're talking about redoing the rule from 2021. Well, it's five years today from there, and if it takes a couple of years to do it, so you're talking about a seven-year runway.
At that point, if FDA is successful at that, you're looking at a fairly significant amount of time that that rule will be in place. And then, as you've heard everyone up here talk about, the market is changing and evolving, and it'll be a new world in four to seven years from now.
Okay.
I think the only other thing I'd add is, obviously there is either dialogue or correspondence that goes on. I think you may have seen recently some correspondence between us and some of the senators. You'll see that we're basically agreeing on a lot together, right? Many of the points that are made on either side are the same. They're the same points that we have. So, I do expect that dialogue and that common ground to continue. Obviously, it's impossible to predict beyond the election and so on. But I think that the nature of that correspondence shows that there's a lot of common ground in delivering tobacco harm reduction in the U.S.
Okay. I'm afraid we're out of time. Obviously, there'll be more time to ask questions over drinks and dinner this evening. But before I hand over to Tadeu, please join me in thanking all of our afternoon speakers.
Okay. Thank you for your questions. To conclude, I would like to thank my leadership team who delivered their presentations with passion, commitment, and all of you who have joined us on our Horizon 2030 Capital Markets Day. Next year, BAT will turn 125 years old. Born in 1902, BAT has lived and flourished through decades of change. Here we are today, ambitious, successful, forward-looking, and shaping our journey ahead. It is a journey that I am immensely proud of. Reflect on BAT today, I believe that this is a rewarding business for multiple stakeholders, consumers, investors, and employees. Each stakeholder group is, in one way or another, an investor in BAT. To be an investor in our company requires belief and conviction. It requires a belief in the future, the reasons to believe in BAT as we navigate towards Horizon 2030.
When I became a CEO in 2023, there were plenty of challenges ahead of us. One of the first actions we took was a full review of our strategy. That strategy has not fundamentally changed, but it has been sharpened. The strategy is one thing. The real challenge is the disciplined and precise execution of the strategy. Of course, the context in which our strategy and value is delivered has changed and will continue to evolve. The three big building blocks of our strategy arrowhead are not just words. We are deeply committed to them. A commitment to deliver quality growth, choiceful and valuable growth. Shaping a sustainable future, ensuring that the future landscape is conducive to our transformation, and a deep commitment to a dynamic business. A fusion of what BAT has always done well with new tools and capabilities.
Back in Southampton in 2024, I committed to focus on a few critical areas, and we have largely delivered on those commitments. Chiefly, returning BAT to our growth algorithm, 3%-5% revenue, 4%-6% profit, 5%-8% earnings growth. Our first half demonstrates our momentum back to that corridor, and I am confident in BAT's future delivery, transforming and performing at the same time. We also recommitted to the multi-category strategy because markets, regulators, and consumers differ. That is not to say that all categories are created equally. We are clear today on the role of each category. Modern Oral has evolved and developed significantly at a real pace. It started from humble beginnings in 2017 with the acquisition of Winnington. We pioneered the category, and today we are the category leader. We will continue to build Velo as the Modern Oral reference.
Our insights, innovation pipeline, and market reach bode extremely well for the future. Even modest movements in incidence and daily consumption have an accelerating impact, and economics are highly favorable. Supporting Modern Oral are vapor and heated products. We have taken you through how we are being more focused, shifting premium, and prioritizing value pools. If the enforcement environment in the U.S. improves beyond our base assumptions, well, we are well positioned to capture value return. Put simply, we want to lead in Modern Oral, win in vapor, and compete meaningfully across inhalation. Resource will be allocated according to those priorities, and Modern Oral has the first call. Much of that resource flows from our combustibles business. The combustibles business will deliver the value the group needs, funding the transformation and our shareholder returns. We have recognized a need to sharpen the execution, and we are addressing it.
Better portfolio laddering, digital enhanced RGM, and a focus on product and pricing. With this enhanced portfolio deployment focused on the 20 markets that deliver 80% of the value, we will deliver within the 1%-2% range growth for combustibles. Moving to geographic footprint, I am proud of our performance turnaround in the U.S. Back in 2024, the business was not where it needed to be. Since then, we have improved in all areas, leadership, regulatory engagement, a stronger portfolio, and much better executional quality. Good businesses are like a flywheel. They feed off their success, and that inspire them to go further. Most recently, Velo+ has reached over 30% volume share of market in under two years, and it is a source of genuine excitement. The U.S. will underpin the group's 2030 algorithm. Two years ago, the U.S. was a plan. Now, it is delivery.
We are clear on the role of our other two regions. The external environment in APMEA has been especially turbulent. South Africa, Australia, and Bangladesh have been facing headwinds. I am delighted, therefore, with the leadership shown by the APMEA team. Consumer-centric growth is the right way forward. Onto AME, which in terms of transformation, is our most advanced new category region. Pioneers of our predominantly smokeless ambition. Just a few years ago, AME was the star performer precisely when they were needed most. That is the strength of a diversified enterprise, both category-wise and geographically. It allows the old source of profits to be re-energized, then replaced by new source of growth. That is the future I see for BAT. Four categories, three regions, all playing their role, contributing to group delivery in a sustainable and bright future well within our reach.
Add to that optionality in Beyond Nicotine. As with early stage Modern Oral, it is a modest business today. It has been built thoughtfully, optimizing capital deployed. As Beyond Nicotine is not built into today's glide path, it is a potential growth kicker beyond 2030. Our productive journey has been impressive. GBP 1.2 billion of productive savings delivered, and a further GBP 2 billion program between now and 2030. Add Fit2 in, and you have a powerful self-help story. Consumer-facing spend and innovation will always be my priority, so we will focus on the discretionary cost base. In technology, especially AI, you may have been surprised by some of what Javed showcased. Perhaps a superficial view of BAT is that we are a well-run global enterprise, yet not always modern and progressive. Well, I would dispute that.
We are now deploying leading-edge technology solutions to partner the best of old BAT with the best of the new BAT, data-led and technology-driven. Another extremely high priority for me is a front-footed approach to scientific and corporate affairs. I see a world where tobacco harm reduction will become better understood and accepted, led by OMNI, which is a game changer and a multi-year journey. However, I really can envisage a world where our transformation is not only permitted, but also encouraged. That is critical because smart regulation is just as important as the portfolio itself. Lastly, let me reflect on our remarkable people and culture. BAT has always had a human quality. Throughout our history, we rightly hold the quality of people as an enduring form of competitive advantage. It is because I know just how impressive BAT's talented people are, that I believe in Horizon 2030.
I went where I started. A 125 years young business, still winning, still growing, full of ambition. Yet, I prefer to focus on Horizon 2030 and the pathway from there to a predominantly smokeless 2035. We have the ambition, the innovation, the leadership, the execution, and the capability to succeed. I said in 2024 that we would deliver, and we will deliver again. That delivery is hard-coded as an investment case, and in how we are all measured and remunerated in BAT. Put simply, we are 100% aligned with you, our investors. If BAT delivers, which it will, we all win. Thank you very much.