Tobacco excise to double in Kazakhstan by 2014

Tobacco excise duties will double in Kazakhstan starting from January 1, 2014, Tengrinews.kz reports citing head of the national coalition For Tobacco-Free Kazakhstan! Dzhamilya Sadykova. Starting from 2014 the excise on tobacco will make 3,000 tenge ($20) per 1,000 cigarettes or 60 tenge ($0.4) per a pack. A respective legislative act has already been signed by Kazakhstan President. According to Sadykova, a further increase of excise duties is expected in the following years. The anti-tobacco coalition suggests to bring the rates to 90 tenge ($0.6) per pack by 2015. This means that the final price of cigarettes will grow as well, but the size of this price raise will depend on tobacco companies. Head of the coalition says that the organization's goal is to bring cigarette price to 1,000 tenge ($6.7) per a pack. According to Sadykova, the doubling of the excise duties would save around 183 thousand lives (including 95 thousand adults and 88 thousand young people) in Kazakhstan. This could reduce smoking among young people by 19 percent and 219 thousand young people will quit smoking. Besides, the state budget revenues would grow 4-fold: from 30 to 130 billion tenge (from $200 to 867 million) per year. Earlier Sadykova said that Kazakhstan's tobacco companies were gaining excess profits and would not be significantly affected by the raise in the excise duties. According to her, the producers make 60 tenge ($0.4) per each pack and a total profit of 138 billion tenge ($920 million) per year. By Dmitriy Khegai