SEOUL, Aug. 22 (Xinhua) -- South Korea's cigarette sales declined this year on price hike and the government's anti-smoking campaign, finance ministry data showed Wednesday.
South Koreans bought 2.01 billion 20-cigarette packs in the January-July period, down 1.3 percent from the same period of last year, according to the Ministry of Economy and Finance.
The fall came as the cigarette price was raised by a whopping 80 percent in January 2015. Tobacco companies were required in December 2016 to put graphic warnings on the upper part of both sides of cigarette packs to discourage people from smoking.
In July, 3.25 million packs of cigarette were sold. It was up 0.7 percent from a year earlier, but was down 20.6 percent compared with the same month of 2014 before the cigarette price was hiked.
The government collected 6.6 trillion won (5.9 billion U.S. dollars) in cigarette tax in the January-July period, up 0.4 percent from the same period of last year.
