Please give us a brief about RELX, the date of its establishment, the extent of its spread globally and in the Middle East markets?
Founded in 2019, RELX International is a multinational electronic cigarettes company that markets and sells RELX, the world’s advanced vape brand powered by the proprietary SuperSmoothTM technology.
RELX, Asia’s leading e-cigarette brand, is widening its footprint across the world, it is currently available in several countries such as the UK, France, Italy, Germany, Indonesia, Philip-pines, Canada, Kuwait, Morocco, KSA and the UAE.
What sets RELX apart from competition is the fact that it has a full ecosystem (such as closed pods, disposables, device, and power bank accessories) that are designed at a cutting-edge research and development centre and produced at one of the world’s largest e-cigarette factories.
RELX’s mission is to make RELX a trusted brand for legal age adult smokers through state-of-the-art products, industry-leading technologies, and scientific advances in collaboration with talented and committed people around the globe. The company has at-tracted global talents from Uber, Procter & Gamble, Apple, Beats, and L’Oréal.
How does RELX ensure that its products conform to international quality specifications and standards? What are these specifications and standards?
RELX International products are designed at a cutting-edge research and development centre with extremely stringent inspection and rigorous quality control processes. It truly understands the needs of its adult consumers and the products are designed to pro-vide them with exceptional alternatives of the highest quality and the most satisfying user experience possible.
Furthermore, it strictly forbids recommending, marketing, or selling e-cigarettes to both non-smokers/ vapers and underage consumers and has numerous initiatives in place to promote youth prevention agenda among stakeholders, commercial and business partners. This falls under RELX International’s The Guardian Programme.
To what extent does the use of e-cigarettes reduce the harms and risks resulting from smoking traditional cigarettes? And how is that done?
Scientific and applied studies have shown that the use of vaping products can help transition away from combustible cigarettes, to the extent where the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) has recently adopted legal mechanisms to allow the prescription of elec-tronic cigarettes by certified practitioners to adult smokers who would otherwise continue smoking.
Here, it is important to note that while e-cigarettes contain nicotine, which is addictive and not risk-free, the latter is not con-sidered the primary cause of smoking related disease, but rather the combustion of tobacco which leads, according to a consensus of scientific studies, to such diseases.
On this note, we highlight the fact that e-cigarettes do not involve combustion, but rather the heating of a liquid that may or may not contain nicotine. As a result, prominent public health bodies, such as the UK’s Public Health England, have repeatedly stated that e-cigarettes are 95 percent less harmful to health than cigarettes.
RELX International is committed to its role in striving for a world free of traditional tobacco smoking and banning the sale of its products to underage persons. What are the measures taken to ensure that this is achieved?
We have a clear vision and core values that underpin RELX, ensuring that minors are protected from using e-cigarette products. Last year, RELX launched the global RELX Pledge initiative, which focuses on protecting underage minors from using e-cigarette products, protecting consumers, and protecting individuals’ livelihoods.
RELX has pledged to contribute to and develop the local communities in which it operates, through three main pillars: The Guardian Programme, The Golden Shield, and The Green Shoots programmes. RELX’s Guardian Programme is an initiative that extends from product development to sales. The product is sold with terms and conditions that protect underage minors from using e-cigarette products, through joint efforts with retailers to verify the legal age of the consumer, and to comply with legislation and regulations to prevent the purchase and use of nicotine products by minors.
How is the RELX brand protected from being counterfeited, and what measures are taken to combat counter-feit products that have negative impacts on society as a whole?
RELX aspires to impose the most severe penalties on smugglers of counterfeit products, with the need to provide the opportunity and open the door for importing and selling licenced and legal products in all markets to remedy this dangerous phenomenon.
Serious steps are being taken by our company to ensure that strict measures are in place at the industry level to combat counterfeit and contraband vaping devices, within the “Golden Shield” initiative, which has contributed to addressing these phenomena in many cases, for example more than 550,000 counterfeit products have been removed from global markets and more than 77,000 websites have been suspended since 2019.
Here, we call on government bodies and authorities to work with us, hand in hand, to put an end to this challenge which is costly for legal businesses, adult consumers, and state treasuries alike.
Aside from working together to identify illegal commercial activities, organise regular training sessions to enforcement bodies, and put in place mechanisms to tackle this growing issue, we believe developing balanced regulations that take into account technological innovation and sound scientific facts, coupled with the need to differentiate between the highest-risk nicotine consumption products (combustible cigarettes) and those with the potential to be less harmful (such as e-cigarettes), can go a long way to support the transition of adult smokers to legally-commercialised better alternatives out there.
What are the RELX’s directions and future plans?
Our vision is to expand into regional and global markets to bring our high-quality products to the largest possible number of adult smokers, with the aim of helping them move towards better alternatives to traditional cigarettes.
To this end, we are working to build a solid network of import and distribution partners with good reputation and solid experience in their field, so that we can launch RELX products in as many markets as possible in the region and around the world.
Also, at the technical level and the company’s R&D department, we are conducting continuous research to develop devices with new and advanced technologies that simulate the requirements of smokers and adult users of vaping devices.