JACK ZIMBA, Lusaka THE world’s third largest tobacco company, Japan Tobacco International (JTI), has clearly found its niche in Zambia, four years after entering the market.
Since it set up shop in Zambia in 2011, the company now has about 7,000 farmers under its out-grower scheme in Eastern and Western provinces, with an investment portfolio of US$12 million.
It is not really the numbers that JTI is interested in, but rather in improving the quality of the tobacco it produces.
Hence, one of the major decisions the company made in the recent past was to integrate farming of tobacco into its business in order to influence the quality of the tobacco that ended up at its cigarette factories.
“Previously as JTI, our model is that we bought all our tobacco from dealers, companies like Alliance One and Universal Tobacco. We never had direct contact with our farmers,” says JTI Zambia general manager Mike Roach. Read More>
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