Agent of Change

His mission, as Naeem Shahab Khan chose to accept it as managing director of Philip Morris Malaysia, is to aim for a smoke-free future

- Elizabeth Soong

In 2017, when Philip Morris Malaysia (PMM) launched its Unsmoke Your World campaign, it boggled the mind as it raised the question—wasn’t this going to affect their main bread and butter? There’s an end game that they’re driving towards, which will be explained a little later, however, this was exactly the reason why Naeem Shahab Khan joined the company last January 2020, which he says makes him excited with his work. “I think PMM has come up with this whole vision of converting as many Malaysians as possible, who are currently smoking combustible cigarettes, to a reduced risk alternate, which in our books we call it IQOS, and drive that conversion as fast as possible so that people get less exposure to harmful substances from combustible cigarettes. And that is the overarching vision that I basically bought into.”

Khan was only 12 years old when his father passed away, primarily because of a smoking-related disease. So to him, what PMM is trying to do here is primarily what makes them different—and might I add, audacious. However, Khan thinks that this is “how we can create a sustainable future for the company, as well as for the smokers in Malaysia.”

What does he mean by this? Will they stop selling cigarettes then? The pragmatic managing director of PMM explains, “Even if we stopped selling, people will not stop smoking. So for us, I think the most important thing is for them to quit, if they don’t quit then we keep on doing as long as we need to so that we can convert cigarette smokers as much as possible to a reduced-risk portfolio. So in a sense, we are trying aggressively to basically make our most profitable business redundant. But that doesn’t mean we will stop; we will still continue to do that business, but we use that business as a prime tool to convert as many people as possible.”