Finance History | 6601 West Broad Street — Philip Morris Companies Took a Name Built for a Holding Company

People treat Altria as a Richmond tobacco parent and a ticker that used to sit in the Dow.

The name was attached to a holding company that still owned cigarettes, food, and an international tobacco book.

On 27 January 2003 Philip Morris Companies Inc. became Altria Group, Inc.

Shareholders had approved the change in April 2002. The parent kept 100 percent of Philip Morris USA, a majority stake in Kraft Foods, and Philip Morris International.

The mechanism was a legal rename, not a sale of the cigarette business.

Management said the new word was meant to show that the listed parent was more than one brand. Critics read it as an attempt to put distance between the holding company and the political weight of tobacco litigation.

The operating company that makes Marlboro in the United States stayed Philip Morris USA.

In 2003 that unit left New York and moved onto this Henrico County campus, the former Reynolds Metals Company International Headquarters at 6601 West Broad Street.

Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill designed the low executive block in 1958. Charles F. Gillette laid out the grounds on a former horse farm. The complex was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2000.

Altria later brought the parent company itself to the same campus, after spinning Kraft to shareholders in 2007 and Philip Morris International in 2008.

The pin is the public edge of the Broad Street campus. The interiors are working offices.

A holding-company name can change in a day. The factory book and the lawsuits stay with the operating subsidiary that still prints the old brand on the pack.

Photo: Crazyale, 13 January 2012, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Reynolds Metals headquarters, later Altria, Henrico County.