No surprise here. During their first year in business in 2015, when the Deeming was still a proposal, Juul publicly stated that they intended to submit to the PMTA process.
At this point they may well be the only vapor products company with the resources to submit applications that the FDA won't be able to reject out-of-hand as incomplete. I would suppose this one of the main reasons they partnered with Altria, which is one of only two companies in the world that has a staff with a proven track record of successfully navigating the PMTA process.
If the deadline stands where it is now at May 11, 2020, Juul may very well end up with something resembling a monopoly on legal vapor products in the USA.
True monopolies virtually never arise naturally; they are almost always the result of some kind of government intervention in the market.
That said, I don't blame Juul for doing what's best for Juul. They're a business, not a charity. I blame government (specifically the FDA) for creating a byzantine process that's almost certain to exclude rest of the industry from the market.
