altria group

Altria Group, Inc. (previously named Philip Morris Companies Inc.) is one of the world's largest food, beverage, and tobacco corporations and a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Altria's tobacco subsidiary Philip Morris is the world's largest commercial tobacco company by sales (the China National Tobacco Company and Japan Tobacco sell larger volumes). Their flagship Marlboro brand is the world's second most popular tobacco brand after Japan Tobacco's Mild Seven. Other popular tobacco brands owned by Phillip Morris are Parliament, Virginia Slims, West (in Germany), and Benson and Hedges (in some markets only). Philip Morris was begun by a London tobacconist of the same name. He was one of the first people to sell hand-rolled cigarettes in the 1860s, selling them under the brand names Oxford and Cambridge Blues, following the adoption of cigarette smoking by British soldiers returning from the Crimean War. The company opened its New York office in 1902 and soon became part of James Duke's American Tobacco monopoly. Though Altria's headquarters are still in New York, in 2004 its Philip Morris USA division completed a move of its 682 New York based employees to Richmond, Virginia in order to consolidate operations at its Richmond office and achieve cost savings for shareholders Reference #1. Philip Morris bought Kraft Foods on October 30, 1988 for US$13.1 billion, in a bid to diversify from the declining tobacco business and to reduce litigation risk. It also purchased the Nabisco division of the former RJR Nabisco in 2000. On January 27, 2003, Philip Morris Companies Inc. changed its name to Altria Group Inc. to better reflect its wide portfolio of assets and as an attempt to shed its image as merely a tobacco company. In November 2004, it was annouced that Altria was considering splitting itself into three separate companies, because the United States tobacco liability problem was lowering the valuation of all areas of its business, including international tobacco sales.