Logista White Paper Calls France's Parallel Tobacco Market Massive and Structural

France's parallel tobacco trade has become a permanent feature of the market rather than a fringe problem, according to a white paper published by Logista and revisited by the French trade publication Le Monde du Tabac. The document, titled « Marché de la nicotine : comment reprendre le contrôle » (Nicotine market: how to regain control), describes the parallel market as massive, structural and in growth.

Le Monde du Tabac had already reported on the paper on 26 June and 1 July, and returned to it to highlight the passage dealing with the scale of untaxed consumption. The starting observation is behavioural: going to a licensed tobacconist to buy a pack of cigarettes is becoming a less common reflex. Some consumers turn away from tobacco for health reasons, but a far larger number are moving away from tobacconists in favour of alternative channels.

Estimates range from 12.3% to 53.6%

The white paper sets out four separate measurements of the share of tobacco consumption that escapes the official French market, produced with different methodologies and reaching sharply different conclusions.

• The TAFE study (Tabac échappant à la fiscalité nationale), published in 2025 for the French customs administration DGDDI and the interministerial drugs mission MILDECA, estimates national consumption of tobacco escaping French taxation at between 12.3% and 22.4%.
• A study by EY-Parthenon puts the parallel market at 38% of the total market for tobacco products.
• A KPMG report produced in June 2026 assessed the parallel market share at 53.6%, identifying 41.4% of cigarettes consumed in France as contraband and 37.6% as counterfeit.
• The Confédération des buralistes, the tobacconists' trade body, estimates tobacco contraband at between 30% and 40% of tobacco sales in France.

The spread reflects genuine measurement difficulty. The share of tobacco outside the official market covers both purchases made abroad and illegal trade arising from smuggling and counterfeiting. Neither is captured by official statistics, and methodologies vary from one source to another in attempting to determine the sums involved.

Tax losses of €4 billion to more than €10 billion

Whichever study is used as the basis, the white paper estimates that the parallel market has caused a tax loss for the French state of between €4 billion and more than €10 billion.

At the lower end of that range, the shortfall is roughly equivalent to the budget of the Ministry of Culture, or to the complete renovation of more than 1,500 schools, according to the comparison cited in the paper. Against a backdrop of lasting budgetary pressure, controlling the parallel market is presented as a major issue for public finances.

Two decades of price-led policy

For more than twenty years, French tobacco control policy has rested on regular and sustained tax increases, with a clear objective: to reduce consumption through the price lever. The white paper acknowledges that this policy has produced effects on smoking prevalence.

It also argues that the same instrument has contributed to generating a parallel market that has become structural, massive and expanding — the reasoning behind the paper's central question of how to regain control of the nicotine market.

For legitimate operators, the divergence between the estimates is itself a commercial problem. With credible figures ranging from roughly one-eighth of consumption to more than half, the size of the addressable legal market, the volume flowing through licensed distribution and the duty the state can expect to collect all depend heavily on which measurement is accepted as the reference.