Smoking sales at e-cigarettes firm

A CHESHIRE company has seen its sales rocket on the back of the e-cigarettes boom.

In the last three years turnover at Sandbach company Ten Motives has stormed from £3.4m to £25m, despite increased competition in the sector.

While international tobacco giants such as Philip Morris (Nicocigs), BAT (Nicoventures) and Imperial Tobacco (Fontem Ventures), have entered the market place with significant marketing budgets, Ten Motives has created one of the sectors biggest brands with Cirro.

Owned by Tony Jones and Arthur Devlin, Ten Motives’ products are sold nationwide at major supermarkets such as Tesco, Sainsbury’s, The Co-operative and Asda.

Tony Jones, co-founder and director said: “Despite competition from rival brands, we have had another landmark year. Both our value and volume sales with our long standing retail distributors are seeing major increases.
 
“We are forecasting further substantial growth for this coming year. We have a robust on-going new product development programme with the continual development of our Cirro brand and we will further benefit from the tobacco products display ban as it comes fully into force this month, as well as the continuing consumer movement away from tobacco based products.

“We are still independent – despite many approaches we have chosen to remain independent, and we will do for the foreseeable future.”

In December 2014, research conducted for The Grocer Magazine by market analyst Neilsen ranked Cirro as the top selling brand in the country with annual grocery store sales of more than £35m – a figure Jones says is around £5m below the actual figure as Neilsen’s EPoS data is not polled from all of the retailers stocking its ranges.

Ten Motives has around 30 staff and last year came close to selling the business to US company Victory for more than £60m.