You have to hand it to Big Tobacco.  As an industry, it’s a survivor.  It’s doing everything it can to reinvent itself in a world in which its core product—cigarettes—becomes more of a social pariah with every passing year.  Let’s take a look at what Big Tobacco is up to and what it might mean for investors in Big Tobacco stocks.

Reynolds American (RAI) made headlines this week by announcing the planned launch of the Revo, a “safe” cigarette that heats tobacco rather than burning it. Philip Morris International (PM) has a similar product in the works for sale overseas, which I highlighted earlier this year.

Yogi Berra, the Hall-of-Fame  New York Yankee catcher, might have called this a case of déjà vu all over again. Reynolds American launched a similar product two decades ago, but it never amounted to much. (Yogi Berra, incidentally, was once a celebrity endorser of Camel cigarettes, a Reynolds American brand.)

E-cigarettes work in roughly the same way. Tobacco is heated rather than burned, and the smoker inhales a relatively harmless nicotine-infused vapor rather than a cloud of carcinogenic smoke. The benefit of the Revo is that it looks and feels more like a real cigarette than its electronic competitors do. And while it’s far too early to be breaking down profitability, I think it’s safe to say that Revo is a better profit model for Big Tobacco. Revo is a real, branded cigarette sold in a pack that can be sold at a premium, not a generic bottle of refill fluid.

I’ve been skeptical of e-cigarettes for a long time. Yes, they could relight Big Tobacco’s prospects. But they are just as likely to speed the decline of traditional cigarettes, and Big Tobacco has no durable competitive advantage in the e-cigarette marketing free-for-all.

So, are Revo and its competitors the answer for Big Tobacco?

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