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Good morning from the newsroom of the Financial Times.

Today is Monday, September 2nd,

and this is your FT news briefing.

The talks to recombine Philip Morris International

and Altria could result in the world's biggest tobacco company.

But what does this kind of merger say about the industry as a whole?

Then I talked to the F.T.'s Federica Cocoa about how remittances by migrants are shaping economies around the globe.

I'm Mark Filipino, and here's the news you need to start your day. Last week merger talks surfaced between tobacco companies Philip Morris International and Altria.

And if they do combine, they were a single company until they split in 2008,

the merger would create the world's largest tobacco company with a valuation of more than $200 billion.

This possible merger says a lot about the state of the tobacco industry and how it's changed over the past few decades.

The tobacco industry is at a moment of profound disruption.

That's the FT.T's U.S. business editor, Andrew Edgcliffe Johnson.

So if you go back more than 20 years ago, these companies signed the largest civil settlement in the U.S. history with a bunch of states about 46

states guaranteeing billions of dollars in payments essentially in recompense for the

harm they'd done to health over the previous decades.

In the intervening 10-20 years,

we've seen heavy investment by the industry,

often with very little results,

in alternative technologies, e-cigarettes and heated tobacco.

...