The top executive for tobacco giant Philip Morris International told The Daily Mail Sunday that the company will stop selling cigarettes in the United Kingdom in the next 10 years.

The company’s CEO Jacek Olczak said the company’s iconic Marlboro brand of cigarettes will be taken off the shelves in the U.K. within the next decade.

“It will disappear. The first choice for consumers is they should quit smoking,” he told the outlet. “But if they don’t, the second best choice is to let them switch to the better alternatives.”

The development is just part of Philip Morris International’s reinvention as it abandons traditional tobacco products.

Olczak became the company’s CEO in May and plans to lead the company’s “smoke-free” transformation. He said the company’s new mission is to find and provide “less harmful alternatives to cigarettes” to the millions of people who would otherwise still smoke.

In May he said, “Our ambition is that more than half of our net revenues will come from smoke-free products in 2025.”…read more.

Snap and Twitter’s shares rose in regular trading on Friday after the social media sites reported second-quarter earnings that beat analyst expectations.

Snapchat’s parent popped as much as 23% after posting a jump in daily active users to 293 million in the quarter, which is about 23% higher than the 238 million daily users reported a year earlier. That beat the 290.3 million expectation of analysts polled by StreetAccount.

Revenue for the quarter more than doubled to $982 million, compared to the $846 million expectation of analysts polled by Refinitiv.
Snap’s net loss shrank 53% to $152 million, compared to its $326 million loss a year ago.

Twitter also had a solid quarter, reporting a 74% jump in revenue to $1.19 billion, which is its fastest rate of topline growth since 2014. Analysts polled by Refinitiv expected quarterly revenue of $1.07 billion.

The company’s stock rose 5% in pre-market trading, before falling to around 2% at the market open.

Twitter is in a strong position, and according to its forecasts, market conditions seem to have improved to the point where it can thrive, Pearse Carson, an analyst at multi-asset investment platform eToro, said.

Its number of monetizable daily active users, or those able to view ads on the platform, rose by 11% to 206 million, Twitter said. Analysts polled by StreetAccount expected 206.2 million.

Advertising revenue rose 87% year-on-year to $1.05 billion…read more.

Despite the challenges many businesses faced during the COVID-19 pandemic, e-Commerce was able to ensure that many of them could still carry on with their business. While consumers could not shop physically, online shopping proved to be the next best option for them.

The beauty of e-Commerce is that it is not just for selling physical products, but also for services. Aside from listing on a services marketplace, companies could also sell promotional e-vouchers, or include a shopping cart system on their own websites. Naturally, the next important step for them was to understand consumer behavior.

Realizing the potential of e-Commerce, banks, large enterprises, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and even government agencies begin adopting e-Commerce. Fintech became an enabler of e-Commerce with more startups developing digital payment solutions, and businesses turned to artificial intelligence to help improve their operations and customer experience.

Consumer demand for real-time payments, too, is on the rise in Malaysia as the pandemic accelerated demand for rapid, contactless payments, according to research by ACI Worldwide and YouGov.

With increased internet penetration and smartphone use, especially within emerging economies in the Asia Pacific (APAC), consumers now expect convenience and speed with mobile apps and instantaneous payments, an area in which the traditional financial industry has struggled to keep up…read more.