BAT INDUSTRIES EMPIRE

The sun never sets on the BAT Industries empire, a thriving relic from the days when Britain’s warships ruled the waves and its colonies dotted the globe.

BAT, formerly known as British-American Tobacco, has followed British influence and British investment to six continents. Created in 1902, BAT began as a maker and marketer of smokes throughout Britain’s colonial empire. Between the two world wars it converted the Chinese to smoking and moved into the U.S. market. Today, it has operations in 90 countries, selling insurance in Australia, producing paper pulp in Portugal and processing tobacco in Zaire and Zimbabwe. Including minority-owned subsidiaries and excluding the Chinese state monopoly, BAT probably makes more cigarettes than any other company in the world.

Britain has now given up all her overseas colonies except Hong Kong, Gibraltar and the Falkland Islands, but BAT Industries, with 305,000 employees and $31 billion in sales last year, keeps on growing. BAT moved into paper products and cosmetics in the 1960s, retailing in the 1970s and insurance in the 1980s.

Over the past 15 years, its U.S. subsidiary, Batus Inc., has acquired the Marshall Field’s and Saks Fifth Avenue department store chains, together with Appleton Papers and Breuners furniture stores. Other Batus holdings include Thimbles, a women’s clothing store chain in the Midwest and East; Ivey’s, a pricey department store chain in the Southeast; and Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp., the nation’s third-largest cigarette maker and producer of such brands as Kool, Raleigh and Viceroy.