We're in the business of tobacco. You could also say that we're in the business of death. Each year, the tobacco industry kills 4.9 million people around the world, including 400,000 in the U.S. Though Licensed to Kill is a young company, we're also highly ambitious. Eventually, we would like all those dying to have been our customers!

Can't comprehend 4.9 million people? We'll help you. That's…

• 560 people dying every hour or 13,400 people per day
  
  
• Equivalent to over thirty three 747 airplanes full of passengers crashing every day
  
  
• If all 4.9 million bodies were lined up head to toe they would cover a distance of over 5,000 miles, which is equivalent to the distance between New York City and Yakutzk, Russia.

Smokers in the U.S. account for only a small fraction of the global demand for cigarettes. Due to the fanatical acts of U.S. public health fundamentalists, who are seeking to curtail our rights to conduct business as we please, the domestic market for the U.S. tobacco industry may shrink in coming years. But never fear, abroad, business is booming.

Licensed to Kill recognizes the importance of the overseas market and has plans to aggressively expand its operations worldwide. Take China, a country of over a billion people -- just imagine if we were able to hook the Chinese smokers - and those not yet smoking - on our deadly line of cigarettes. Yup, you got it: jackpot!

The future is certainly bright for our industry. 80,000 to 100,000 young people become addicted to tobacco every day. 250 million children alive today will die due to tobacco. By 2030 the global death toll will increase to over 10 million deaths every year. 70% of all tobacco deaths will occur in low-income countries, countries that are easy to "buy off" and where tobacco control groups have little or no financial resources at their disposition. Yes, our future is bright indeed.

We are proud to be bringing America's popular cigarette brands to the people of the world. Outside of the U.S., these brands represent the very essence of life, liberty, and opportunity. As former Philip Morris CEO Geoffrey Bible said at the company's annual shareholder's meeting in April 2002, with the fall of the communist block, people in Eastern Europe now have the "freedom" to smoke [American brands]. We couldn't have said it better.

Tobacco globalization is here to stay, and the related globalization of its human toll is simply an economic externality of the trade - something that, luckily, our company doesn't have to concern itself with. We've got more important things to focus on, like getting our popular cigarette brand "Global Massacre" to surpass Marlboro as "the cigarette sold most around the world."