Understanding Legal, Illicit & Estimated Stamps

Total Volume

Each consumption record's Total Volume is the estimated overall consumption of a product in a country for a given year, drawn from market and industry data sources.

Legal Volume

Legal Volume is the portion of total consumption accounted for by legitimately taxed and stamped product (recorded for cigarettes). This is typically sourced from official excise or tax-paid release figures.

Illicit Volume

Illicit Volume is calculated as the difference between total volume and legal volume — product consumed that did not pass through the legitimate, taxed supply chain (counterfeit, smuggled, or otherwise untaxed product).

Estimated Stamps

Where a country's tax stamp programme requires a physical stamp per unit sold, the platform calculates an Estimated Stamps figure — the number of stamps that would be required to cover the legal volume, based on the packaging size and volume multiplier configured for that country and product (for example, converting cigarette sticks into packs, using each country's typical pack size). These calculation parameters are stored alongside each record so that historical figures remain accurate even if packaging assumptions change later.

Why the Split Matters

The legal/illicit split is one of the platform's core analytical uses — it lets you gauge the scale of the illicit trade in a market relative to legitimate, stamped consumption, and how that balance has shifted over time.