British American Tobacco's vaping sales boom - but shares hit after buyback disappointment accreditation British American Tobacco's shares took a hit on Thursday after the company released its results and failed to announce renewed plans to buy back shares. BAT - whose brands include Dunhill, Peter Stuyvesant, Rothmans and Pall Mall reported a 4% increase in its operating profits, but a decline of 1.3% in its diluted headline earnings per share for the year to end-December. This was primarily due to the impairment of its Russian and Belarusian businesses as well as restructuring charges and litigation. The company is still in negotiations to sell its Russian business, and hopes to seal the deal before the end of the year. It didn't want to give details about the prospective buyer. BAT's revenue increased by almost 8% to 27.7 billion. Revenue from its vaping and heated tobacco business grew by more than 40% to 2.8 billion. Brands like Vuse (+44%), glo (+27%) and Velo (+46%) saw strong revenue growth. BAT now expects this business to become profitable a year earlier than planned in 2024. But by late afternoon its share price was down by almost 3% at R641.99 on the JSE. After BAT bought back 2 billion in shares last year, no new plans to do the same were announced on Thursday. Reuters report that analysts were expecting a buyback, and this disappointed the market. South Africa BAT's results show that the company's market share (measured in sales volumes) in South Africa's legal market for cigarettes and tobacco heated products declined by 0.2 percentage points to 65.8% last year. Its position in South Africa remains dominant compared to most of its other markets - with its market share only higher in Denmark, Pakistan, Brazil, Chile and Bangladesh. Last month, BAT South Africa said falling cigarette sales mean it may have to cut another 200 jobs at its local operations. Since 2020, the company has retrenched more than 30% of its workforce, equating to around 500 positions. This is due to a 40% decline in its cigarette sales since the start of the pandemic, due in part to a boom in illegal sales. The tobacco producer believes that the illicit market now accounts for 70% of South Africa's total cigarette market. BAT confirmed that it expects to exist 30 markets in the coming year, and sell around 20 billion fewer cigarettes. The article has been updated to clarify the company's market share in South Africa's legal market for cigarettes and tobacco heated products.

In the past five years, the external environment posed the greatest challenge to most business operations. With the aid of the article, analyse the macro-environmental factors that the British American Tobacco (BAT) has to contend with.