Altria raises its 2026 forecast on growth partly from an import refund its release does not size

Altria raised its 2026 forecast for adjusted earnings per share to $5.66-$5.74, from $5.56-$5.72 when the year began. The growth behind the raise comes from cigarettes. Adjusted operating companies income in smokeable products, the segment's profit before corporate costs and one-off items, rose $116 million in the September 2026 quarter from a year earlier.

In its results the company credited that rise mainly to two things: higher prices, and higher refunds of the taxes and duties it pays on imported cigarettes. The second is a recent addition. Management has tied the refunds to what it calls its import and export business, which also makes cigarettes under contract for companies that sell them outside the US. The results release does not put a dollar figure on the refund. A 3.9% rise in segment profit, earned while domestic shipments shrank, therefore blends two different sources of money.

The filed numbers do show the programme growing quickly. Altria shipped 1,595 million contract-made cigarettes for export in the quarter, 5.1 times the volume a year earlier and roughly a tenth of its domestic cigarette shipments. Capital spending in the first nine months was $259 million against $124 million a year earlier. In January management said the import and export investment drove the year's higher spending and paid back in less than a year, though the company later said a larger capital budget mainly reflects consolidating its smokeless-tobacco plants.

One line in the segment's accounts moved far more than volume would explain. Excise taxes charged against smokeable revenue fell 15.9% from a year earlier, while domestic cigarette shipments fell 2.9%. The release does not tie that drop to the refund, but on the call the chief financial officer described the refund's timing as a federal excise tax (FET) credit, which would land on this line. Volume explains about $23 million of the $127 million fall, calculated from the reported figures.

The refunds have shaped the timing of this year's guidance. In July the company said it expected more benefit from import and export activity in the second half than the first, and that the second-half benefit would be split more evenly between the third and fourth quarters because of the timing of some second-quarter benefits. On the latest call chief financial officer Heather Newman said she still expected the two quarters to be roughly balanced, and pointed to a contract with Philip Morris International: "You are right to call out that, that PMI agreement does not start until 2027." When an analyst offered an estimate of the annual run rate, chief executive Salvatore Mancuso said the company would not give a range.

None of this makes the pricing gain illusory. Price realisation, the average price increase the company captured, was 4.4% in the quarter, and the company lists pricing ahead of refunds among the drivers. Mancuso objected on the call to isolating one piece of the margin, which he described as the product of pricing, cost control and the refund together. The narrower point is that the raised guidance counts both, and the results release does not separate them; an analyst on the call put the third-quarter refund at about $124 million, a figure management did not confirm or dispute. A holder trying to judge how much of the cigarette business's growth will carry into next year, when the PMI contract adds to the arrangement, is working from one combined number.