The company Philip Morris International (PMI), leader in the tobacco sector, has decided to transfer part of its production of cigarettes (cheroot cigars) from its factory in Poland to the Canary Islands with the help of Dos Santos, a company with which it has been collaborating for more than a decade. This was announced yesterday by the general manager of PMI for Spain and Portugal, Enrique Jiménez, after a meeting with the President of the Regional Government, Ángel Víctor Torres, to whom he presented all the details of this business project, which involves an investment of more than 15 million euros and will create 120 new direct jobs in the Islands.
The new production, destined to supply 12 countries of the European Union (EU), including Germany, Italy, France and Belgium, brings a total export value of over 36 million euros, thus consolidating tobacco as one of the most exported products from the Canary Islands after bananas. In fact, 84% of the total national production of tobacco products is manufactured in the Canary Islands, which represents 1% of the Canary Islands’ GDP and generates 5,279 jobs.
PMI’s general manager for Spain and Portugal, Enrique Jiménez, stressed that this is a major operation “for the factory itself, for the industrial sector of the Islands and for its export balance”. For Jiménez, it is a project that could make a “very important” contribution to the Islands’ economy and that demonstrates Philip Morris’ “strong commitment” to a “strategic” territory, which, furthermore, “will help diversify the economy of the archipelago and will ensure that tobacco remains a strategic industrial sector in the Islands”.
The first phase of this operation is already underway and the multinational expects all phases to be completed by the end of March 2024. This project will be developed at the Dos Santos factory in Gran Canaria.
For her part, the director of Dos Santos, Dácil Barreto, declared that it is “an enormous challenge to have been chosen to take on this production, after competing with four other European factories, but also a recognition of many years of collaboration”. And, in this sense, she said that this demonstrates that a company like Dos Santos, a family business with Canarian capital, “can work with high standards hand in hand with multinationals”.
