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Swedish convenience stores to stub out sale of cigarettes

Sweden's two most well-known convenience store chains, Pressbyrån and 7-Eleven, plan to completely remove cigarettes from their shelves in the long run.

Published: 14 May 2024 06:43 CEST

a woman being served at the till at pressbyrån

Pressbyrån and 7-Eleven both plan to phase out the sale of cigarettes. Photo: Hasse Holmberg/Scanpix

Reitan Convenience, the company that owns the chains, is set to phase out their sale of cigarettes and ultimately stop selling them, it said in a press statement.

“The risks of smoking tobacco are well known, both when it comes to health risks but also the impact on the environment and labour conditions in the production chain. We’re also seeing that some countries are introducing various forms of bans on smoking, for example progressive age bans,” Reitan’s CEO for the Swedish market, Anna Wallenberg, told Swedish news agency TT.

The UK and New Zealand have both spoken of introducing laws to ban young people from buying tobacco.

Just over half of the chains’ tobacco sales today comes from cigarettes, and the rest is made up of other nicotine and smoke-free products as well as snus, Sweden’s moist tobacco pouches which may be part of the reason why the use of cigarettes is dropping in Sweden.

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Swedish word of the day: snus

Reitan Convenience also said it aims to phase out the sale of products containing palm oil, a controversial oil criticised by environmental and human rights groups for causing deforestation and human rights violations in the tropics where the palms are grown.

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India among top investment destinations for Swedish companies

“The stars are aligned for India. They have got a lot of internal investment programmes started, have acquired internal stability and managed to navigate the geopolitical situation in such a way that no one has any doubts any longer,” said Business Sweden CEO Jan Larsson.

Swedish businesses are in general less optimistic than last year about the global business scene, due to a struggling European economy and escalating trade wars between the US and China, according to a new Global Business Climate Survey 2024 by Business Sweden.

Despite this, many of the 24 countries in the report maintained a generally positive outlook, with scores over 3 on a 5-point scale, where 1 equals very poor and 5 very good.

Overall, just six percent of respondents perceived the business climate as very good, 31 percent as good, 45 percent as neutral, 15 percent as poor and 2 percent as very poor.

There are also some markets where sentiment has improved slightly since last year: Brazil, South Africa, South Korea, the UK and Spain.

At the other end of the scale, interest in investing in giant markets such as China and Germany appears to be on the wane, along with Taiwan and Mexico.

“Doing business in Germany comes with a lot of administrative work compared to Sweden, which is time consuming and costly,” EWAB Engineering GmbH managing director Fredrik Almcrantz said in the report. “Digitalisation doesn’t replace paperwork related to compliance with rules and regulations, it is just an added layer on top of traditional routines.”

Almost a third (65 percent) of Swedish businesses surveyed expect revenue to grow and plan to increase their global investments in the year ahead. A clear majority (70 percent) of companies were profitable last year, while 12 percent reached break-even and 13 percent reported negative results.

The Netherlands and France had the highest percentage of profitable Swedish companies, while the highest share of companies making a loss were reported in South Korea and Germany.

India, the United Arab Emirates, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia are among the countries on the list identified as having the most favourable business climates for Swedish companies, while Germany, Mexico and the Netherlands were rated lowest on the list.

India, Brazil and Indonesia also had the highest share of companies saying that the Swedish brand contributes “to an extent or great extent” to their success in those markets. At the other end of the scale were the United States, Canada and Saudi Arabia.

“In the Indonesian market, Swedish products are generally considered to be high quality, robust and durable,” said M. Syahrul Mohideen, area sales manager at ScanBox Thermoproducts AB.

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