Robin Pagnamenta
 
 
 
Paul Adams says he spends much of his time travelling. After all, the UK is one of a few of countries where British American Tobacco, Britain’s fourteenth-largest company in terms of market value, has a relatively small share of the cigarette market.
“This entire head office is almost entirely focused on the rest of the world,” he says, sweeping his hands across the table for emphasis. “We are a very outward-looking company. We have been in China since 1903, We were in India in 1905 and have been in Latin America since the 1920s,” he says. “We were born global.”

 
 
Thus when BAT has hit the headlines in recent months, often it has been because of its involvement in stories overseas, be it challenging Kenyan public smoking bans in court in Nairobi or introducing innovative worker-friendly pensions in Russia, where state benefits can be forbiddingly meagre. BAT shares can rise and fall purely because of good or bad news affecting its peers in America or elsewhere. BAT’s share of the UK cigarette market is just 6 per cent.

This international background is reflected in Mr Adams’s personal business experience, too. After his first job as a management trainee at Shell, he went on to work for Beechams and then occupied several senior roles around the world for PepsiCo before joining BAT.

His overseas experience has served him well in BAT. He describes one of his key challenges as being to transform the group from a relatively loose federation of affiliated subsidiaries into “a much more integrated global enterprise”.

And all this from an almost typically suburban family background in Guildford, Surrey, where the 54-year-old father of a son and two daughters spends a lot of his time on Saturdays “standing on the touchline of school matches”.