Cigarette Makers See Future （It's in Asia) —By Philip ShenonNew York Times ServiceThe Marl

Cigarette Makers See Future (It's in Asia)

—By Philip Shenon

New York Times Service

The Marlboro Man has found greener pastures.

The cigarette-hawking (兜售香烟的) cowboy may be under siege back home in the United States from lawmakers and health advocates determined to put him out of business, but half a world away, in Asia, he is prospering, his craggy (毛糙的) all-American mug slapped up on billboards and flickering across television screens.

And Marlboro cigarettes have never been more popular on the continent that is home to 60 percent of the world's population.

For the world's cigarette-makers, Asia is the future. And it is probably their savior.

Industry critics who hope that the multinational tobacco companies are headed for extinction owe themselves a stroll down the tobacco-scented streets of almost any city in Asia.

Almost everywhere here the air is thick with the swirling gray haze of cigarette smoke, the evidence of a booming Asian growth market that promises vast profits for the tobacco industry and a death toll measured in the tens of millions.

At lunchtime in Seoul, throngs of fashionably dressed young Korean women gather in a fast-food restaurant to enjoy a last cigarette before returning to work, a scene that draws distressed stares from older Koreans who re member a time when it would have been scandalous for women from respectable homes to smoke.

In Hong Kong, China, shoppers flock into the Salem Attitudes boutique (时装商店), picking from among the racks of trendy sports clothes stamped with the logo of Salem cigarettes.

In Phnom Penh(金边), the war-shattered capital of Cambodia, visitors leaving an audience with King Sihanouk are greeted with a giant billboard planted right across the street from his ornate (装饰华丽的) gold-roofed pal ace. It advertises Lucky Strikes.

According to tobacco industry projections cited by the World Health Organization, the Asian cigarette market should grow by more than a third during the 1990s, with much of the bounty going to multinational tobacco giants eager for an alternative to the shrinking market in the United States.

American cigarette sales are expected to decline by about 15 percent by the end of the decade, a reflection of the move to ban public smoking in most of the United States. Sales in Western Europe and other industrialized countries are also expected to drop.

But no matter how bad the news is in the West, the tobacco companies can find comfort in Asia and throughout the Third World, markets so huge and so promising that they make the once all-important American market seem insignificant. Beyond Asia, cigarette consumption is also expected to grow in Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe and in the nations of the former Soviet Union.

Status appears to matter far more than taste. "There is not a great deal of evidence to suggest that smokers can taste any difference between the more

expensive foreign brands and the indigenous (本地产的) cigarettes," said Simon Chapman, a specialist in community medicine at the University of Sydney. "The difference appears to be in the packaging, the advertising."

He said that researchers had been unable to determine whether the foreign tobacco companies had adjusted the levels of tar, nicotine and other chemicals for cigarettes sold in the Asian market. "The tobacco industry fights tooth and nail to keep consumer

A．Y

B．N

C．NG