MAJOR Southampton employer British American Tobacco (BAT) says more people started using its alternatives to smoking in the first nine months of this year than in all of 2020.

The tobacco giant had 17.1million customers for “non-combustible” products such as vaping, heated tobacco and oral products by the end of September.

BAT – which employs around 1,200 people at Regents Park Road in Southampton – said it was still making a loss from the new product categories but that for the first time, losses were narrowing.

This means they have contributed to growing the business’s profits, helping put it on track to meet the company’s financial guidance for the year.

Chief executive Jack Bowles said: “Benefiting from a continued strong new category performance, which is now a sizeable contributor to group revenue growth, we are making excellent progress towards our £5billion revenue target by 2025, supported by a clear focus on THP (tobacco heated products).

“By leveraging our increased scale, new categories will contribute to profit growth for the first time as their losses start to reduce, a key step on our pathway to profitability by 2025.

“We are building strong, fast-growing, global brands of the future, adding another 3.6m consumers of non-combustible products in the first nine months of the year, more than in all of 2020,” he added.

BAT, which is behind Lucky Strike and Pall Mall, said revenue was growing by more than five per cent thanks to its new categories. Its “combustibles” business – mainly made up of cigarettes – is also growing thanks to high prices.

In the US, sales of combustibles dipped as the industry as a whole is expected to decline by 5.5 per cent in America and remain flat globally due to an increase in Indonesia.

The value that it gained from selling cigarettes increased by 10 basis points, or 0.1 per cent, in the nine months to the end of September.

The business grew its cigarette sales due to increases in Bangladesh and Pakistan.

Southampton is the centre of BAT’s global research and development and supply chain functions, as well as being the site for jobs in finance and global travel retail.