While sales of cigarettes and rolling tobacco continue to improve, the cigar market has taken something of a battering since the introduction of the ban on smoking in public places in 2007.

Sales fell sharply again this year by 5.4% to £297m and, according to Alastair Williams, Scandinavian Tobacco Group UK trade marketing manager, the impact of the ban is still being felt across the sector. While value is down more than 5%, the actual number of cigars sold has dropped by 8.4%.

"If people are out in bars with friends it takes a long time to smoke a big cigar," says Williams. "People don't necessarily have the time for this, especially in poor or cold weather."

This, he says, is why of all the different kinds of cigars on the market, miniatures actually have actually held up relatively well compared with the other categories.

Extra-large cigars may only account for a tiny proportion of the market, but sales were down 53.3% on last year, while medium/large cigars fell 12.3% and small cigars by 14.2%. By comparison, sales of miniatures declined by just 3.8% and in so doing claimed a 2.8% bigger chunk of the market, at 58.1%.

Further evidence of the shift in consumer behaviour is the rise of Scandinavian Tobacco's Henri Wintermans Café Crème Blue, in volume sales terms now the UK's biggest cigar brand, with a 20.2% market share for the year to December 2010 [Nielsen]. Hamlet, despite selling fewer cigars than Café Crème Blue , hung on to its number one value sales spot.

"There has been a natural migration to miniature cigars," says Williams. "They are the natural choice for the time-poor, venue-restricted cigar smoker."

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