RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company

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RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company

logo
legal form Incorporated Company ( Aktiengesellschaft )
founding 1875
Seat Winston-Salem United StatesUnited StatesUnited States 
management Joseph Paul Fragnito (CEO)
sales 8,634,000,000 USD
Branch Tobacco industry
Website www.rjrt.com
As of December 31, 2015

The RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company ( RJR ) is an American tobacco company founded by RJ Reynolds in 1875 and based in Winston-Salem , North Carolina . The company is the second largest tobacco product manufacturer in the USA and produces brands such as Camel , Lucky Strike , Winston and Pall Mall , among others . Since 2017, the entire Reynolds American Inc. holding has belonged to British American Tobacco Plc (BAT).

history

George Washington , One of Reynolds' early brands
RJ Reynolds Tobacco Factory in Winston-Salem, NC

Richard Joshua Reynolds, son of a Virginia tobacco producer , sold his stake in his father's plantation in Patrick County at the age of 25 and started a tobacco company in Winston, North Carolina in 1875. The place was the closest with a railway connection. He acquired his first factory building, called the little red factory , from the Moravian Brethren , where he produced 150,000 pounds of chewing tobacco with seasonal workers in the first year . Reynolds anticipated the increase in the popularity of tobacco smoking and introduced pipe tobacco as a blend in the following years, supported by intensive advertising campaigns.

From 1890 the RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company (RJR) was a public company. RJ Reynolds owned nearly 90 percent of the company and was elected president with his brother serving as vice president. In 1892 the company built a second factory building and increased production to several million pounds of tobacco products a year.

Due to significant capital requirements, RJ Reynolds sold two thirds of its RJR shares in 1898 to the Continental Tobacco Company, a subsidiary of the American Tobacco Company of its competitor James Buchanan Duke . But he kept his position as president.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Reynolds took over most of the tobacco factories in Winston-Salem. The company produced 25% of America's chewing tobacco, and Camel brand cigarettes became the most popular in the United States . In 1911 the American Tobacco Company was broken up by the US Supreme Court due to antitrust legislation and the company was forced to part with all Reynolds shares. RJ Reynolds and members of his family bought back some of the shares and regained control of RJR in 1912. As a result, Reynolds developed articles of association that funded Reynolds employees to purchase shares from excess funds and profits under the Reynolds share purchase plan. By 1924, the majority of the company's voting shares were owned by company employees. In 1917 the company bought 84 hectares of land in Winston-Salem and built 180 houses for the workers, later "Reynoldstown".

With Winston, RJR launched one of the first filter cigarettes on the market in 1954. The first menthol cigarette followed in 1956 with Salem .

In the 1960s, a number of food and oil companies were acquired. As part of a restructuring, RJ Reynolds Industries Inc. was founded as the parent company in 1970 to diversify the company in tobacco and non-tobacco segments .

In September 1985, Reynolds Industries took over Nabisco Brands Inc. and renamed the company RJR Nabisco Inc. a year later .

Between October and November 1988 there was the most expensive takeover battle in the history of the US economy. The aim was the hostile takeover of the RJR subsidiary RJR Nabisco . A group of investors led by Shearson Lehman Hutton ( Lehman Brothers ) and Salomon Brothers led by Nabisco boss F. Ross Johnson , the Pritzker family ( Marmon Group ) supported by First Boston Bank and the holding company Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. (KKR) were involved. On November 30, 1988, KKR finally took over Nabisco for $ 24.88 billion. As a result, managing director F. Ross Johnson received the largest severance payment in history at $ 53,800,000. From then on, it was considered a symbol of excess in the financial markets.

In 1999, the Swiss- based international business RJRI was sold to Japan Tobacco , which was merged into the newly founded JT International based in Geneva . This also included all of RJ Reynolds' trademarks outside of the United States.

In December 2000, Philip Morris International Inc (PMI) took over Nabisco Group Holdings Corp. (NGH) from KKR. After Philip Morris integrated the company's grocery division, Nabisco Holdings (NA) , into its Kraft group, it sold the remainder of its parent company, NGH, to RJ Reynolds Tobacco.

In January 2002, RJ Reynolds Tobacco Holdings acquired Santa Fe Natural Tobacco Company Inc.

On July 30, 2004 , RJ Reynolds merged with Brown & Williamson , the American division of British American Tobacco . The merger took place after approval by the American Federal Trade Commission (FTC) by means of a tax-free 1: 1 share swap with a volume of USD 2.6 billion. In the course of the following restructuring, the two companies were combined with Santa Fe Natural Tobacco and Lane Limited under the umbrella of the newly founded holding company called Reynolds American Inc. (RAI) and the brands Pall Mall, Lucky Strike and Kool went from B & W to RJR over. The shares of RAI were first traded on August 2, 2004 on the New York Stock Exchange , replacing those of RJR.

In May 2006, the Conwood Company, the second largest producer of smokeless tobacco products in the United States with its brands Grizzly and Kodiak, was taken over by RAI, which renamed the American Snuff Company (LLC) on January 1, 2010 . Santa Fe Natural Tobacco and Lane Limited were sold to the Scandinavian Tobacco Group in March 2011 .

On July 18, 2014 sentenced jury in Pensacola RJ Reynolds to pay damages of 16 million dollars to the widow of a 1,996 died of lung cancer longtime heavy smoker, and to pay a fine of 23.6 billion dollars as the tobacco company had failed intentionally, this Educate people that smoking causes lung cancer and is highly addictive to nicotine, even though the company was aware of the effects. RJ Reynolds described the amount of the sentence as excessively excessive and announced that he would appeal the verdict.

In January 2017, British American Tobacco plc took over the remaining 57.8 percent of the shares in Reynolds American Inc. from the holdings of Louisville Securities Limited and Brown & Williamson Holdings, Inc. The underlying purchase agreement amounted to around 49.4 percent Billion dollars and consisted of $ 29.44 in cash and 0.53 BAT shares per RAI share.

Brands

RJ Reynolds brands include Camel , Kool , Winston , Salem , Doral , Natural American Spirit , Eclipse and Export A , among others . Other brands that are no longer advertised to a large extent include Barclay , Belair , Capri , Carlton , GPC , Misty , Monarch , More , Now , Tareyton , Vantage and Viceroy . Five of the company's own brands are among the top ten selling cigarette brands in the United States.

Historic Buildings

The company's factory buildings were the largest in Winston-Salem, and featured the latest technologies such as steam power and electric lighting.

  • The second Reynolds factory, built in 1892, is the oldest still standing today. It was sold to Forsyth County in 1990 .
  • The company's headquarters in Winston-Salem, the 20-story Reynolds Building , built in 1929 in the style of Art Deco , was designed by the New York architecture firm Shreve, Lamb and Harmon . At 96 m high, it was the first skyscraper in the southern states and has been on the National Register of Historic Places since August 2014 .
  • The Whitaker Park factory site in Winston-Salem was built in 1961 and covers an area of ​​90,000 m².

Trivia

The company had 1972 to 2003 title sponsor of NHRA - Dragster and NASCAR Winston Cup Series.

In 1987, RJR was the mascot Joe Camel cigarette brand Camel back to life. Joe Camel, a anthropomorphic cartoon - camel , was seen by critics as an attempt to arouse the interest of children and adolescents for smoking. RJ Reynolds claimed that Joe Camel's "lovely character" was simply intended to be an incentive for adult smokers .

The takeover of RJR Nabisco by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. in 1988 formed the basis for the bestseller Barbarians at the Gate by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar and the 1993 television film of the same name by Glenn Jordan . It is considered the beginning of the aggressive company acquisitions that later led to the grasshopper debate.

In October 2002, the European Union accused Philip Morris and RJ Reynolds of supplying non-EU countries such as Poland, Yugoslavia, Cyprus and Switzerland with quantities of cigarettes that are well above a possible consumption and thus indirectly support smuggling.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ RJR Annual Report 2015 (page 38)
  2. ^ A b c d Frank V Tursi: Winston-Salem: A History . 1st edition. John F. Blair, 1994, ISBN 978-0-89587-115-2 , pp. 109 ff . ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  3. ↑ a b c d e Our History. Reynolds Tobacco Company. Retrieved January 22, 2017 .
  4. ↑ a b c d e f g R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company. In: Encyclopædia Britannica . Retrieved January 22, 2017 .
  5. ↑ a b R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Holdings, Inc. History. In: Fundinguniverse. Retrieved January 22, 2017 .
  6. ^ A b Wolfgang Drescher: The most successful entrepreneurs AK . tape 4 . Campus, Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 3-593-37819-1 , p. 110 ff .
  7. ^ A b Peter Maier, Klaus Walter (editor): International mergers and cooperations - successfully implemented . 1st edition. Wiley-VCH, 2003, ISBN 978-3-527-50061-1 , pp. 66 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  8. ↑ a b c Kamal Ghosh Ray: Mergers and Acquisitions: Strategy, Valuation and Integration . PHI, 2010, ISBN 978-81-203-3975-0 , pp. 538 ff . ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  9. ↑ Robert D. Herhey Jr .: F. Ross Johnson, symbol of '80s Corporate Excess, this at 85. In: The New York Times (NYT). December 31, 2016, accessed January 12, 2017 .
  10. ↑ History of the RJR Nabisco takeover. In: The New York Times (NYT). December 31, 2016, accessed January 12, 2017 .
  11. ↑ Philip Morris buys Nabisco. In: The world . December 13, 2000, accessed January 22, 2017 .
  12. ^ Before a tobacco merger in the US. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ). June 24, 2004, accessed January 22, 2017 .
  13. ↑ Reynolds American is waiting with forecast. In: Handelsblatt . August 2, 2004, accessed January 22, 2017 .
  14. ↑ Camel manufacturer to pay smoking widow $ 23 billion. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . July 20, 2014, accessed January 22, 2017 .
  15. ↑ Lucky Strike buys Camel for $ 50 billion. Der Spiegel , January 17, 2017, accessed on January 22, 2017 .
  16. ↑ The 2016 annual meeting of shareholders of Reynolds American (p 36)
  17. ^ Reynolds Building. In: National Register of Historic Places. United States Department of the Interior , accessed January 22, 2017 .
  18. ↑ John J. O'Connor: Review / Television; Those Good Old Takeover Days. In: The New York Times . March 18, 1993. Retrieved January 22, 2017 .
  19. ↑ Anette Dowideit: When the age of financial jugglers began. In: The world. November 30, 2008, accessed January 22, 2017 .
  20. ^ Rudolf Wagner: EU complains against tobacco companies. In: Der Spiegel. Retrieved January 22, 2017 .