NEW YORK --During the last month of 2013, new leaders emerged in Nielsen's electronic cigarette numbers: while Lorillard-owned blu continued to top the charts with a 45.2% dollar share and 36.4% unit share, Logic Technologies took the No. 2 position in both dollar and unit share for the first time.
In the period ending on Dec. 21, 2013, Logic had a 20.3% dollar share and 22.6% unit share, beating out NJOY's 18.3% dollar share and 15.5% unit share (according to the report, these top three companies account for approximately 75% of convenience store sales).
"We are thrilled that adult consumers continue to recognize the high quality of our products," Logic president Miguel Martin said in a press release. "As evidenced by the latest Nielsen rankings, Logic's continued month-over-month growth demonstrates adult smokers are increasingly choosing Logic."
The Nielsen report—released earlier this month—also marked the first time Reynolds American's Vuse and Altria's MarkTen electronic cigarettes were tracked. While both products are still in very limited markets, Vuse had a 1% share of dollar sales and a 1.9% share of unit sales, while MarkTen had a 0.4% share of both dollar and unit sales.
As for the overall performance of the segment, c-store dollar sales grew by 65.9%, with a 52.8% increase in unit sales.
Wells Fargo senior analyst Bonnie Herzog reported that "even though e-cig category dollar sales growth decelerated slightly, sales continue to grow at robust levels."
Those robust levels included $39.5 million in c-store sales and $11.1 million sales in in Nielsen's "expanded all outlets combined" (XAOC) channel during the four-week tracking period.
"This implies $700 million annual sales in Nielsen-tracked channels," Herzog wrote in a research note. "We believe e-cig sales in non-Nielsen tracked channels plus online sales ($500-625 million) suggest the category size at retail of $1.8 billion."
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