President Xi Jinping sent a congratulatory message to the Lanting Forum on Chinese Modernization and the World held at the Meet-the-World Lounge in Shanghai.State Councilor and Foreign Minister Qin Gang gave a keynote Speech at the Opening Ceremony of The Lanting Forum on Chinese Modernization.
President Xi pointed out that realizing modernization is a relentless pursuit of the Chinese people since modern times began. It is also the common aspiration of people of all countries. In pursuing modernization, a country needs to follow certain general patterns. More importantly, it should proceed from its own realities and develop its own features.
Ambassador Zhao Zhiyuan stressed that, after a long and arduous quest, the Communist Party of China has led the entire Chinese nation in finding a development path that suits China’s conditions. We are now building a strong country and advancing national rejuvenation on all fronts through a Chinese path to modernization.
China will provide new opportunities for global development with new accomplishments in Chinese modernization, bring more tangible benefits to Chinese and Ethiopian peoples, lend new impetus to humanity’s search for paths toward modernization and better social systems, and work with all countries to advance the building of a community with a shared future for mankind!
China held the Lanting Forum on Chinese Modernization and the World
About consumer behaviour
With the high rates of inflation around the world, and not in the last place here in Ethiopia, the costs of living are skyrocketing. The increasing costs of living have a direct effect of the buying patterns of consumers, as their buying power is decreasing rapidly. Consumers around the world have many similar needs. All people must eat, drink, and have a roof over their heads. Once these basic needs are met, people will try and improve their standard of living: a more comfortable home, more recreation and higher social status. Although basic needs and the desire to improve the standard of living are universal, people’s ability to achieve these objectives is not the same at all. The economic, political, and social structures of the country people live in affect the ability of people to achieve these goals. To understand consumers, whether here in Ethiopia or in a country where you intend to export your products to, you must examine four aspects of consumer behaviour:
- What they can afford.
- What they need.
- Why they buy.
- And how they buy.
What people can afford varies significantly from country to country and the total wealth in a country is an important indicator of market potential. Governments have a major influence on the distribution of wealth in their country, by means of policies, taxes, subsidies, or ownership of industries for example. Low wages and unemployment are factors that increase the lower income class. Concentration of business ownership in a few families or individuals decreases the size of the upper class.
People spend money to satisfy their needs. They will first fulfil their basic needs like food, clothes, and housing before spending money on more luxury items. Consumption patterns therefore differ tremendously between classes of a society and between different countries. In less developed countries people tend to spend a bigger part of their income on food and in richer countries they will spend relatively more on health, recreation, and education for example.
Next, we need to find out why people buy what they buy, in other words what are the motives of consumers. Culture and norms come into the picture here. With the rich coffee culture in Ethiopia and the ceremony around it for instance, few Ethiopians will be treating their visitors on a cup of instant coffee. And pork products for example are not eaten by most Ethiopians for religious reasons.
Social class is another factor. People who belong to the same social class, based on their income, education and occupations, tend to have similar buying patterns. They may wear the same kinds of clothes, sunglasses, jewellery, watches, handbags, etc. At home they may have appliances like a tv, satellite dish, computer, or they will drive a certain type of car. And their children are likely to want certain things as well, e.g. toys and kinds of shoes.
It also matters who makes the decisions at home when it comes to spending the money and buying for the family. Ask yourself who for example buys any of the following items. Is it the husband, the wife or do they decide together on buying the groceries, furniture, the electrical appliances in the house, insurances or the car? And what influence do the children have? Mind you, many marketing strategies target children and they are informed more and more. They hear or have an opinion about what is cool, what is healthy, what is trendy, and they tell their parents. Mothers have a hard time explaining that the other cheaper brand is just as good.
Levels of education and literacy play a role as well. They go hand in hand with the economic development of a country. A low level of literacy affects the market in two ways. First, it reduces the market for products that require reading such as books and magazines. Second, it reduces the effectiveness of advertising. There may be a relation here with the way companies advertise their products on ETV, in the form of drama. Not a bad strategy I would say, considering most people watching ETV around that time.
We must be careful though not to generalize consumer behaviour too much. Consumption patterns of individual buyers still vary considerably. Not everybody in the same social class will buy the same goods. Many consumers are careful with spending their money and balance quality with the price they are willing to pay. When it comes to food, it becomes even more complex as cheaper food is often not the most nutritious.
A wise consumer will ask at least two questions before deciding to buy a product:
Do I need it? Can I afford it? The challenge for the seller and producer therefor is items to find out what people need most and what they afford.
Ton Haverkort
Bereket Kumsa
Name: Bereket Kumsa
Education: High School Diploma
Company name: Bekyma Hiking, Décor and Events
Title: Founder
Founded in: 2022
What it do: Organize trips and hiking
Hq: Addis Ababa around Gerji
Number of Employees: 2
Startup capital: 20,000 birr
Current Capital: Confidential
Reason for starting the Business: To create my own income
Biggest perk of ownership: Working for my self, being able to stand by my self
Biggest strength: Can easily communicate
Biggest challenge: Poor security around the country
Plan: Expand my business
First career: Different kind of small businesses
Most interested in meeting: President Sahle-work Zewde
Most admired person: My family
Stress reducer: Praying
Favorite past time: Time with my wife
Favorite book: The Bible
Favorite destination: Korea
Favorite automobile: BMW
King Charles faces fresh calls to return Ethiopia’s ‘stolen prince’
Prince Alamayu was the son of Ethiopia’s Emperor Tewodros II
He was taken to Britain after his father killed himself during British siege in 1868
King Charles is facing fresh calls to return the remains of a ‘stolen’ Ethiopian prince who is buried at Windsor Castle.
A favourite of Queen Victoria, Prince Alamayu had been brought to Britain after his father, Emperor Tewodros II, killed himself as British forces stormed his hilltop palace in northern Ethiopia in 1868.
Prince Alamayu was educated at Sandhurst military academy but tragically died at the age of 18 from pneumonia in 1879 and was buried in catacombs next to Windsor’s St George’s Chapel.
In 2019, the Queen refused to allow the repatriation of his bones, but now a new book about his life has led to renewed calls by campaigners to return them.
However, experts have insisted that moving his bones now would be a mistake. Royal historian Hugo Vickers told MailOnline that it would be ‘pointless’ to return his remains and explained that Queen Victoria ‘generously’ took the prince in as a ‘great honour’.
The Ethiopian government first demanded the return of Alamayu’s remains in the 1990s.
But Palace officials have insisted that they cannot recover them without disturbing those of others.
Campaigner Alula Pankhurst, who sits on Ethiopia’s cultural restitution committee, told The Times that the argument is just an ‘excuse for not dealing with it.’
‘Bringing this young man home means unearthing uncomfortable truths that people don’t want to think about.’
New book The Prince and the Plunder, by Andrew Heavens, re-tells the story of the prince and his family.
It tells how Alamayu’s father, King Tewodros II, known as ‘Mad King Theodore’, had wanted to be friends with the British and wrote a letter to Queen Victoria in 1855.
After she failed to reply to that and a follow-up letter, Tewodros took the British consul and several missionaries hostage in a high mountain jail.
A huge army of nearly 40,000 British troops were sent to rescue the 44 hostages. As the successful mission neared its conclusion, Tewodros took his own life.
Tewodros’s wife, Alamayu’s mother, died on her way down the mountain, leaving her son an orphan.
Alamayu was put under the care of towering colonial officer Captain Tristram Speedy and taken back to Britain.
According to Speedy, Alamayu’s mother had told him that he ‘take my son and treat him as your own’.
Alamayu was taken to Osborne House on the Isle of Wight to meet Queen Victoria, who later wrote in her diary that he was ‘a very pretty sight, a graceful boy with beautiful eyes and a nice nose and mouth, though the lips are slightly thick’.
Whilst the Queen had wanted him to remain on the Isle of Wight, he went first with Speedy to India before the Treasury ordered that he be properly educated.
He was sent to Cheltenham and Rugby and then on to Sandhurst, but struggled with his studies.
The prince caught pneumonia when he fell asleep outside one night. After refusing to eat, he passed away whilst living in Headingly, in Leeds.
After learning of his death, Victoria wrote: ‘It is too sad! All alone in a strange country, without a single person or relative belonging to him… His was no happy life, full of difficulties of every king.’
Near his burial spot is a plaque bearing the inscription: ‘I was a stranger and you took me in.’
Responding to the calls to return his remains, Mr Vickers said: ‘Queen Victoria generously took him in as a great honour and allowed him to be buried next to St George’s Chapel, and he should remain there because that is what everyone wanted at the time.’
Referring to the military coup which ended the life and reign of Ethiopia’s Emperor Haile Selassie, Mr Vickers added: ‘I don’t know why they want him back since in Ethiopia they killed the last emperor in 1975.
‘Are they so keen to have their imperial family back now?
‘He had a pretty awful time, this poor prince. It is pointless sending him back. I don’t understand why on earth they want to do that.’
Fellow historian Alexander Larman added: ‘The Palace are unyielding on things like this.
‘I suspect they won’t do anything because if they set a precedent there will be other things they have to do.
‘I would be amazed if they ever do anything. It is quite standard policy with the Royal Family to ignore these things and hope they go away in due course.’
Buckingham Palace has been approached for comment. A spokesman previously said: ‘We are aware of this sensitive and complex issue and have communicated with the Ethiopian government over a number of years.’
In 2019, Ethiopia’s ambassador to London, Fesseha Shawel Gebre, urged the Queen to consider how she would have felt if one of her relatives was buried in a foreign land.
‘Would she happily lie in bed every day, go to sleep, having one of her Royal Family members buried somewhere, taken as prisoner of war?’ he asked. ‘I think she wouldn’t.’
He insisted that the boy was ‘stolen’.
The Ethiopian government has previously said that it will repeat its demand at every meeting its ministers have with their British counterparts.
In 2007, the Ethiopian government wrote to the Queen requesting the return of his body so he could be buried beside his father.
‘Had he not been taken, had he not lost his father, he would have been the next king of Ethiopia,’ Fesseha previously said.
The embassy claimed that a letter from the Queen’s private secretary said that she sympathised but there were concerns about disturbing the remains of others buried alongside him.
It is understood more than 40 bodies were buried in the catacombs between 1845 to 1887. It is claimed that it would therefore be impossible to identify and exhume his body.
