The e-cigarette industry has been on fire lately. Is this a permanent fix or is it about to go up in smoke? This is where the money is.

Hi everyone, I'm Simon Erickson here with is.

Hi everyone, I'm Simon Ericsson here with Consumer Goods analyst Sean O'Reilly.

Sean, thanks for being a part of the program today.

Thanks for having me, Simon.

You know, Sean, we've been talking a lot about the alternative tobacco industry including

e-cigarettes which has risen from basically nothing in 2008 literally no sales which is now a

2.5 billion dollar industry this year. You know comparing that to the 80 billion

dollar tobacco industry this is this is a significant stake right here that's kind of

of come out of nowhere. Can you tell us a little bit about how this market has come to be

and why it's growing so quickly?

Yeah, no, and it's actually, it's the first major shift in tobacco

since, I mean, you're talking about an industry that's hundreds of years old.

So, you know, the e-cigarette has actually

been around since the 1960s, and then the e-cigarette's

in their current form that we're all familiar with

when we go to the convenience store

and we see them behind the counter was actually just created in 2003.

There's a gentleman, let's see here, Han Lick, a Chinese pharmacist, is generally credited with inventing the electronic cigarette we used today when he created the current delivery system where you basically

use heated up water to deliver the nicotine in 2003.

And what I referred to in the 60s was a man named Herbert Gilbert filed a patent for what

he called a smokeless non-tobacco cigarette.

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