It is now official, two of the largest pipe tobacco companies in the world, as of July 1st, officially merged. Scandinavian Tobacco Group (STG) has announced that it has agreed to purchase Mac Baren Tobacco Co. The deal is valued at $76.84 million dollars. Mac Baren’s pipe tobacco products include all of the Mac Baren label pipe tobacco blends (and cigars), as well as the Amphora and Holger Danske labeled blends. STG says that after the closing, it will now take about 120 days to integrate the businesses. Mac Baren has approximately 200 employees and is expected to keep the majority of them to continue providing their worldwide service of selling pipe tobaccos and cigars. Scandinavian Tobacco Group’s headquarters is also in Denmark, but they have varied business operations worldwide, mostly dealing in tobacco, and currently have approximately 10,000 employees.
This is the ninth acquisition of pipe tobacco and cigar companies that STG has made in roughly eight years. The others being:
- January 2016 – Dunhill Tobacco
- January 2018 — Thompson Cigar
- July 2018 — Peterson Pipe Group
- January 2020 — Agio
- November 2021 — Moderno Opificio del Sigaro Italiano
- June 2022 — Room101
- February 2023 — Alec Bradley
- April 2023 — XQS
So, does this latest merger in the pipe tobacco industry have any affect on pipe smokers? I have no idea. STG did have all Dunhill branded tobaccos renamed Peterson’s back in 2018, but continues to have the Orlik Tobacco Company produce many of those blends. In that situation, in order to complete the deal, STG was forced to switch the name Dunhill to Peterson because Dunhill insisted that they wanted their brand name disassociated with all tobacco products.
The good news for us is that a huge company with a great track record, thinks that pipe tobacco is still a great investment!
Steve
