Cigar Imports Rise: 2024 Ends With Small Gain
The final numbers for 2024 just came in, and they show another year of growth. The United States imported 430 million premium, handmade cigars in 2024, up 0.9 percent from the 426.3 million imported in 2023, according to Cigar Association of America data.
This marks the fourth year in a row where imports have exceeded 400 million units. (Note that the Cigar Association revised its number on 2023 imports, bringing the figure down from 467.8 million to 426.3 million. That revision meant the market declined slightly between 2022 and 2023, rather than growing, and has gone back up somewhat in 2024.)
Market leader Nicaragua led the way shipping 253.1 million cigars, up 2.7 percent over 2023. The country is the largest producer of handmade cigars in the world, accounting for 58.8 percent of shipments to the United States last year.
The Dominican Republic, which ranks second, saw its numbers decrease slightly to 106 million cigars, down 1.8 percent from 2023. Honduras, the No. 3 producer, had a decrease of 3.3 percent, to 67.4 million cigars.
Those three countries, known as The Big Three, make up just over 99 percent of the handmade cigars that are exported to the United States.
Costa Rica, a marginal producer of handmade cigars, posted a large gain of 44.9 percent, to 2.5 million cigars. No other producer reached the one-million-unit mark.
It wasn’t long ago when 300 million cigars was a measuring stick defining a good year in the cigar business. A second cigar boom began during the pandemic, taking cigar shipments from 338 million cigars in 2019 to 430 million today, a gain of 27 percent over five years.
