E-cigarettes in Russia

E-cigarette market landscape in Russia

While the market was stagnating throughout 2017 and 2018, it is now showing growth of around 20%. This is mainly due to the increasing share of solus users and growing interest in pre-filled pods, which are more expensive per ml than nicotine salt e-liquids.

However, overall industry stakeholders became less positive about the current state of the vapour industry. This is presumably due to negative publicity about e-cigarettes, new taxes (on all types of e-cigarette hardware) and also a high level of uncertainty in terms of upcoming regulation.

We can identify several factors largely impacting the e-cig market in Russia:

Excise duty on e-liquids
Increasing popularity of pods and nicotine salts
Growing popularity of heated tobacco
Upcoming regulation.

While the first factor encouraged the black market, the second one resulted in increasing the popularity of Big Tobacco pre-filled pod brands and thus growing availability of these products in traditional retail. The growing popularity of heated tobacco could potentially take away a certain share of consumers who could have chosen vaping.