Word: tobacco
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...other behemoths including Sears and American Express, is more than a matter of size and the inevitable cycles of change. Many giants manage to avoid hardening of the arteries. Du Pont, which is nearly 200 years old, remains an industry leader in synthetic materials. Philip Morris started as a tobacco shop in 1847 but is now a $55 billion-a- year company that sells everything from beer to breakfast cereal. General Electric managed to grow from light bulbs to jet engines, and Motorola from car radios to microchips...
...Jackson, who ran in 1828 as a man of the common people, the Clintons will throw a reception for the public the day after they move into the White House. Taxpayers can only hope the Clintons have better luck than Old Hickory. His guests broke the furniture and spat tobacco juice in the corners...
...attention to their health and pushing for tougher smoking restrictions. "They're doing a lot of things at once, not small steps over 30 years as in the West," says Dr. Judith Mackay, the region's leading antismoking crusader. Even China, the world's largest producer and consumer of tobacco, now restricts smoking in public places and bans advertising...
None of this means that smokers need fear extinction anytime soon. Cigarettes are still highly profitable, as the governments of France, Italy and Japan know, since they monopolize or control state tobacco industries. France's SEITA earned $2.3 billion in sales revenues last year. Cigarette consumption generated $6.1 billion in tax revenues -- a clear disincentive for enforcing the new ban too zealously...
...tobacco companies are making up for dwindling domestic sales by expanding sales abroad. Asian health officials complain that the influx of fancy foreign brands hurts their efforts to control the habit, particularly among the young. The most fertile ground for new exports is Eastern Europe and Russia, where Marlboro and other brands are relatively expensive -- and often smuggled -- status symbols. In these former communist countries, the idea of state control over private lives is decidedly more ambivalent these days, and the antismoking crusade is just beginning...