Cigar Imports Off To Slow Start In 2025
The first two months of 2025 have not been great ones for the handmade cigar industry. Shipments to the United States were off 8.7 percent compared to the first two months of 2024, according to data released today by the Cigar Association of America.
The decrease comes after a period of considerable growth in the cigar market, which boomed from 2019 to 2022, soaring from 338 million handmade cigars in 2019 to 465 million in 2022. There was a contraction in 2023 (a contraction that initially went unreported, as the Cigar Association of America recently recalibrated its 2023 numbers) and last year ended with a small gain of just under 1 percent, with shipments of 430 million.
It’s difficult to draw too much from only two months of data—this could be an aberration, or it could signal the start of something larger. Tariffs have been the source of some concern in the U.S. cigar market, but it’s unlikely that tariffs have played any role in these figures.
The sharpest decrease came from Honduras, the third-largest producer of handmade cigars for the U.S. market. Honduras shipped only 6.2 million handmade cigars to the United States in the first two months of 2025, down 19.3 percent when compared to the same period for 2024.
Nicaragua, the world’s largest producer of handmade cigars, shipped 29 million cigars, down 9.3 percent.
Dominican shipments contracted by 4.1 percent, to 12.5 million cigars.
Those three producers for some 99 percent of handmade, cigar shipments to the United States.
