PT Hanjaya Mandala Sampoerna Tbk, commonly known as Sampoerna, sometimes stylised as SAMPŒRNA is an Indonesian tobacco company owned by Philip Morris International. Sampoerna is the largest tobacco company in Indonesia. It produces clove cigarettes, otherwise locally known as kretek cigarettes. A typical brand is Sampoerna 'A' Mild, a filter cigarette in white paper.[1]
History
In the 1930s, Liem Seeng Tee (Lin Shengdi) adopted the Indonesian name Sampoerna (in Dutch spelling, cf. sempurna) meaning "perfection" as his family name, thus becoming the company's namesake. Sampoerna began producing Dji Sam Soe in 1913 in Soerabaia, East Java. Following Seeng Tee's death in 1956, his two daughters took over the running of the company, while his two sons ran separate tobacco-related businesses. The daughters shifted the company's focus toward white cigarettes, which nearly caused bankruptcy for Sampoerna. Youngest son Liem Swie Ling, who ran a kretek factory in Bali, returned to Surabaya in 1959 to rescue the company. He shifted production back to hand-rolled Dji Sam Soe brand cigarettes. In 1968, the company launched Sampoerna A Hijau. By the mid-1970s, the company was producing over 1 million cigarettes daily and had 1,200 staff. Swie Ling in the 1970s began to hand over the running of the company to his second-eldest son, Liem Tien Pao, better known as Putera Sampoerna, who went on to modernize the company and expand its operations.