Alison Cooper will become the fourth woman chief executive in the FTSE 100 when she steps into Gareth Davis’s shoes in May.

Mrs Cooper, 43, said that, under her leadership, Imperial would focus more on sales and less on acquisitions such as the purchase of Altadis, the Franco-Spanish tobacco company. “I would like to have a stronger reputation for driving sales,” she said.

She joins Dame Marjorie Scardino at Pearson, the educational publisher and home to the Financial Times, Angela Ahrendts at Burberry, the fashion house, and Cynthia Carroll at Anglo American, the mining group, in the elite club of female FTSE 100 chief executives.

Mr Davis forecast flat to slight growth for tobacco companies in the long term yesterday. The industry veteran, who has 39 years under his belt at Imperial, said: “I think we will see very slow growth in five or ten years in the global market for tobacco. Demographics alone will drive that with the population growth in some major emerging economies.”

Already on the board of Wolseley, the heating group, Mr Davis plans to add more non-executive directorships to his CV, with the aim of taking on a chairmanship.

Imperial, which makes Davidoff and Gauloises cigarettes, said yesterday that its full-year pre-tax profits had risen 39 per cent to £2.23 billion after the integration of Altadis. Cigarette volumes were 10 per cent higher at 322 billion.

The biggest cigarette maker in the UK also surprised the City by paying off £1 billion of its debt, more than expected.

It has benefited from smokers trading down during the recession, and particularly from the growth in sales of roll-your-own tobacco.

Both Mr Davis and Mrs Cooper criticised plans for a ban on tobacco displays in shops in the UK. Mrs Cooper said that the company hoped that a Conservative government might decide not to stop retailers showing cigarettes behind their counters.

Imperial has shed 1,900 people as part of the Altadis integration this year and plans to let another 500 go over the next 18 months.

When Mr Davis took the helm at Imperial in 1996, the business was British-focused, with 2,800 employees and a market value of £2 billion. More than a decade later, after spending £17.5 billion on a programme of aggressive international expansion, it employs 38,000 people around the world and has a market capitalisation of £18 billion.

Mrs Cooper, a married mother of two, has been at Imperial for ten years. When she was appointed chief operating officer in March this year, it was viewed as a signal that she was being groomed to take over from Mr Davis, who had expressed a wish to retire before he turns 60 in May 2010.

After joining Imperial from PricewaterhouseCoopers, Mrs Cooper worked as group financial controller and took a crucial role in helping to integrate Reemtsma, the German tobacco group bought by Imperial for £3 billion in May 2002. She became director of finance and planning the following year and sales and marketing regional director for Western Europe in 2005.

One tobacco industry analyst said: “Alison has worked closely on all the big deals with Gareth so the transition at the top of Imperial would appear to be very smooth.”

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