Introduction: Pointful Korea, the cigarette brand owned by International Korea Tobacco (IKT), underlined its bold growth ambitions in travel retail by becoming a Diamond Sponsor of the MEADFA Conference held in Bahrain on 27-29 November. Director Dae-Young Jung spoke to The Moodie Davitt Report about progress since.
The Moodie Davitt Report: Pointful Korea was a Diamond Sponsor at MEADFA. How was the experience for you?
Dae-Young Jung: Becoming a Diamond Sponsor at MEADFA was an excellent chance to promote our brand Pointful and its brand image. Having seen Pointful at MEADFA, we’re hoping many will recognise and continue to remember the brand. As this was our very first exhibition event, we’ve learnt tremendously and gained invaluable experience.
We plan to actively sponsor and host booths in 2023 at the Asia Pacific and Cannes shows, World Tobacco Exhibition, Intertabac and The Trinity Forum.
How did retailers react to your presence at MEADFA?
Pointful received an overwhelming welcome from the retailers. They showed profound interest and a positive reaction that left us feeling incredibly grateful.
At first, the retailers approached our booth with curiosity as they were unfamiliar with our products since our market is currently solely within Asia. But soon after the retailers encountered our cigarettes, they gave them high marks for quality.
Thanks to that, we were able to have deep conversations with a broad range of retailers across diverse sectors attending MEADFA – beyond our purpose of promoting our brand and introducing our products.
Even after the MEADFA event, we are pleased to be continuously communicating with a lot of incredible retailers and maintaining good relationships with them.
What are the next steps in Pointful’s international and travel retail expansion?
We will intensively target not only the ship supply sector, border stores and airport duty free shops, but also local markets to increase the distribution of our cigarettes.
Our advantage, we believe, is that the quality of our products is similar or better than other tobacco products with a higher price range. And yet our products are relatively affordable compared to other brands.
Predictions of a global recession are rampant for the current time and the future. To stay competitive in such market conditions, our goal is to provide the best products to our clients with more reasonable prices.
Through continuous development of new markets and business expansion, we will exert great efforts to ensure that our cigarettes can make significant international progress in terms of quality and product value.
Do you have any other key product developments in the pipeline?
For the king size cigarettes, we currently have 6mg-type, menthol-type, and capsule-type cigarettes. We will release 8mg-type cigarettes in the future. For the super slim category, we have 4mg-type cigarettes, with a menthol-type and capsule-type to be released in 2023.
Having started out by producing cigar-type cigarettes, our company has since invested over 20 years in developing the flavours of the current products. That is the reason we pride ourselves on the quality of our products and feel competitive in terms of price. We believe that compared to other brands that occupy the same price range as ours, customers can easily feel that the quality of our products is much higher.
It is simple to augment other SKUs based on the existing basic baselines which are our king size 6mg-type and super slim 4mg-type. In addition, we will manufacture more SKUs to cater to consumers’ diversified tastes according to different market characteristics. We are working vigorously on further developing our product design as well, so please stay tuned and maintain the high anticipation. ✈
Strong ESG commitment
According to the IKT website, the company plans to evolve as a globally-competitive tobacco company through expanding its production facilities and through sound ESG (Environment, Social, Governance) credentials. “We will do our best for the public good of society and develop into a company that pursues our philosophy of ‘common good’,” the company said. ✈
