How Esse Cigarettes Are Smoking Rivals

Smuggled cigarettes made by South Korea's KT&G account for a significant share of the Indian market

- Sumant Banerji

• Evasion of tax makes Esse cheap. One stick of smuggled Esse Lights costs ₹10, while a like-for-like slim Classic Connect stick costs ₹15 because of tax.

Sometime during the first few days of the covid pandemic-induced lockdown in March 2020, Vaibhav Gurang, who works for an advertising agency in Gurugram, had his first taste of Esse Lights, a brand of slim cigarettes made by KT&G, a South Korean company.

As the supply chain was disrupted and shops shut, Gurang’s friendly neighbourhood shopkeeper could only provide him with two packets of Marlboro Lights, his preferred brand, but sold him a carton of Esse as a backup.

Gurang exhausted the Marlboros in the first week, and as the lockdown extended, began smoking the Esses. Since then, he has been hooked. The brand's premium packaging and claim of low smell and tar content added to its appeal. "I was not a big fan of slim cigarettes but started smoking them out of compulsion. They cost less and have a significantly less bad odour. Since I got used to Esse, I have not missed Classic or Marlboro," he says.

What Gurang and possibly his trusted supplier do not know is that the cigarettes are smuggled into the country through sometimes brazen and, other times, highly sophisticated methods. Earlier this month, for instance, a team from the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence's (DRI) Mumbai zonal unit intercepted shipping containers at Navi Mumbai's Jawaharlal Nehru Port port in Nava Sheva. They were arriving from Dubai's Port of Jebel Ali, and supposed to contain Chinese viscose-woven carpets. Instead, the team found one of the containers was stuffed with 6.72 million Esse Change cigarettes, worth ₹10.08 crore. The other container had 325 rolls of old, used carpets as cover cargo to hoodwink customs officials.