While giving a detailed presentation about latest tobacco survey, Director Retail Audit Services of Neilsen, Asad briefed media here on Friday that only reliable research data can help in framing better tax policy for revenue generation and any misleading facts can hamper government efforts to bring better tax policies. The misleading facts can hamper government efforts to bring better tax policies.
Leading global research organisation explained that the Company is present in more than 100 countries employing more than 35,000 people globally. Nielsen has been presented in Pakistan for more than 25 years and it proudly provides research data to local, multinational, public sector and social sector organisations.
He provided a detailed review regarding Nielsen's Retail Audit services methodology. Asad explained that the tobacco sector is also amongst the 80 product categories for which they conduct audits on daily basis and their research findings have highlighted that the 02 multinationals cigarette manufacturers have 67 percent market share whereas the local cigarette manufacturers have 33 percent market share.
He further told that the local cigarette manufacturers have a strong hold in the rural parts of the country with their highest share of more than 50 percent in South Punjab.
Asad added that the 86 percent of the brands produced by the local cigarette manufacturers are sold below the minimum selling price mandated by the Government of Pakistan ie Rs 47.39 per pack and 77 percent of their brands are sold below the minimum applicable tax of Rs 33 per pack of 20 cigarettes.
Neilsen CEO Qurat-ul-Ain also briefed media about the creditability of their research data saying that the Nielsen ensures high quality output through multiple quality checks at each point of research and digitization has ensured minimal human interference due to which the research results are untempered and pure. She mentioned that they conduct audit surveys in the market on daily basis for more than 80 product categories.
Neilsen CEO added that when research and figures are released by reputed multinational research companies like Neilsen, there is little to doubt as these companies do not disappear after doing a single project instead they are concerned about their reputation and long term sustainability; hence they will always conduct researches in a transparent manner and give pure and unadulterated results.
Recently, there have been multiple researches conducted by NGO's and other organizations that misquote the statistics and figures about tobacco but such data releases are usually circulated in media in order to pressurize the Government into taking steps that may harm the economy of a country. In many cases research companies neither have established offices in the country nor do they have adequate research methodology to support their claims.
During two tier tax system, the government suffered a loss of more than 30 billion in one year ie from 2014-15 to 2016-17 and with the introduction of third-tier, the revenue has bounced back to Rs 89 billion in 2017-18 from Rs 74 billion in 2016 - 17, he added.
According to FBR sources, government is expected to generate taxes of Rs 116.5 billion from the tobacco industry in the ongoing fiscal year out of which two multinational tobacco companies will pay Rs 115 billion while tax collected from the local tobacco companies is going to be mere PKR 1.5 Billion.
