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By Nelson Acosta
HAVANA (Reuters) - Cuba's top cigar maker Habanos said on Monday that sales of the company's luxurious smokes had soared to a record $827 million in 2024 as revenue poured in from fast-growing markets in China and elsewhere in Asia.
Habanos Vice President Jorge Perez said revenue jumped 16% over the previous year as the company reaped high-end demand from a growing class of wealthy smokers in Asia, a region which now accounts for nearly one-quarter of the company's sales globally.
Cuba's cigar business, together with rum exports, is among the crisis-racked country's last thriving export industries and critically important for raising foreign currency necessary to buy food, fuel and medicine.
Habanos S.A. is owned 50% by Cuba's communist-run government and 50% by a consortium of Asian investors under the umbrella group Tabacalera.
Soaring sales in 2024 came even as Cuban growers struggle to recover from Hurricane Rafael in November and Hurricane Ian in 2022, both of which ravaged the western tobacco growing provinces of Artemisa and Pinar del Rio, damaging infrastructure and crops.
Jose Maria Lopez, a Habanos vice president for development, told Reuters at the company's annual festival outside Havana that tobacco production was "guaranteed" for its cigar-making despite recent natural disasters.
"The total tobacco production in Cuba may be reduced but those are poorer quality tobaccos that would never enter the production of our export cigars," Lopez said.
"Only a small part of all national tobacco production is dedicated to cigars, and that amount, from the highest quality leaves, is guaranteed," he added.
Cuba's luxuriously smooth tobacco has long topped the cigar industry, with aficionados touting the Caribbean island's unique variety of tobacco, rich soils, and ideal climate - as well as Habanos' insistence on rolling its cigars by hand.
Executives told reporters that China once again topped sales in terms of value, followed by Spain, Switzerland, Britain and Germany.
(Reporting by Nelson Acosta; editing by Dave Sherwood and Bill Berkrot)
