“We expect to finalize the design of our first capsule product by the end of this year, and we expect to follow PMTA by the end of 2024.”

In context

“roduct development. Our approach puts the consumer at the center of everything that we do. We receive more data on their preferences, purchasing patterns and friction points than we ever have. Additionally, we embedded our regulatory sciences team early in the process to align our product development efforts with FDA expectations. We believe these efforts are building a promising pipeline of wholly owned heated tobacco products and intellectual property consisting of heated tobacco capsule or HTC formats and new to market technologies. We believe capsule products can appeal to smokers who are open to novel, smoke free products but have not yet found a satisfying alternative to cigarettes. This audience includes the millions of US smokers who tried but ultimately rejected e-vapor products. We expect to finalize the design of our first capsule product by the end of this year, and we expect to follow PMTA by the end of 2024. We also expect to partner with JT to launch this product in an international test market using JT's sales and distribution network. We plan to share more on this product platform once the design is finalized. We believe moving beyond smoking in the US requires multiple FDA authorized products within a smoke free category to appeal to a diverse range of smokers and help them transition away from cigarettes. We believe that our pipeline of heated tobacco products and partnership with JT combined with the internal capabilities I described earlier, positions us well to increase adoption of smoke free products for the millions of smokers interested in these products. Let's now move to the e-vapor category. In the third quarter, total estimated e-vapor volumes declined by 4% versus a year ago a”