Intended to encourage the entire business community to follow the lead in abiding by the law, the third round of federal tax payers’ recognition ceremony was held on Thursday October 20, 2022 at Sheraton Addis hotel in the presence of president Sahle-Work Zewde and other senior government officials.

This year’s program has recognized 400 registered businesses and tax payers that have maintained transparent conduct and paid their taxes in a timely manner.
From this 400 awarded tax payers 40 of them are said to be platinum, 120 gold and 240 silver awardee tax payers, additionally 14 taxpayers were honored by being awarded 3 times with one tax payer being awarded a special prize for exposing corruption.

Ethio telecom launches an Omni channel supported cloud based contact center product for businesses.
During an event held on Tuesday October 18, 2022, Ethio telecom unveiled this new product to its customers.
“As a leading digital solutions provider and in alignment with our vision, mission and three year LEAD growth strategy, we have launched our cloud based contact center as a service which enables enterprises to boost their customers’ satisfaction,” the telecommunications giant stated.
Contact Center as a service is a cloud based customer experience solution that automates and standardizes the process of receiving and responding to customer requests across different communication channels such as voice, SMS, e-mail, websites, social media and chatbot beyond traditional call centre services, which are limited to voice services and handling social media separately.
“It will boost customer satisfaction by availing instant responses and reducing call waiting times resulting from long queues,” said FrehiwotTamiru, CEO of the company.
The center is said to provide omni channel live agent support which integrates requests made through different channels and allows the contact center agent to access them all at once thereby empowering the agent to provide full support to the customer and increase customer satisfaction thus enabling enterprises to better monitor their service quality by expanding customer feedback at low costs without the need to build their own contact center.
According to Ethio Telecom, the Contact Center is established as part of the company’s three year LEAD strategy.

EPA embarks on compliance follow-up on bottling industries

The Environment Protection Authority (EPA) sets to embark on the follow up in implementation of the new initiative that water bottling companies have taken to withdraw the use of masterbatch (MB) on their plastic bottle. Stopping the use of MB altogether is said to save up to USD 100 million annually.
It is to be recalled that when a detailed study was conducted by the Food, Beverage and Pharmaceutical Industry Development Institute, MB was identified to have a negative impact on the environment, health, economy and other related issues. Following the study, stakeholders in the water bottling industry as well as government bodies in one accord agreed to halt the use of MB – a plastic bottle colorant, as of October 11, 2022.
Following that decision is has become a common occurrence to now see non-colored bottles in the market.
Ashenafi Merid, General Manager at the Ethiopian Beverage Manufacturing Industries Association, expressed that bottlers following the unison agreement have suspended the use of colored bottles in their production, “If there are colored bottles in the market, it is because they were produced prior to the deadline. From here on end, non-colored packaging will dominate the market.”
He explained that the decision was taken during a workshop held early July following the recommendation by the Institute to suspend using MB.
Traditionally most of Ethiopian water bottlers have been using MB to colorize their plastic bottles to blue, which to some degree has its share of costs in foreign currency.
Ashenafi told Capital that at the workshop EPA has taken the initiative to control the implementation of the new practice.
“EPA early this week has informed us that it will commence its overlook on factories and bottlers with regards to implementation of the agreement into practice,” he added.
In a letter issued and sent on October 14 to the Ethiopian Plastic and Rubber Manufacturers Sectroal Association, the Food and Beverage Industry Research and Development Center ordered manufacturers to stop producing MB blended perform as per the decision passed a couple months ago.
According to Ashenafi, whilst speaking on the assessment carried out three years ago, he referenced that using MB has a cost of USD 30 million per annum, “Obviously this amount is much high at the current stage since the number of bottlers has increased.”
He elaborated that as per the latest study, bottlers are not using the MB and the used bottle shall be recycled as polyester fabric and yarn, which is an input for the textile industry.
“As per the study, the textile industry is allocated about USD 45 million to import polyester fabric and yarn for their production processes. So if we start producing non-colored bottles it can be transferred to other industries which in turn save the amount of foreign currency allocated to the textile industry. The new decision shall save USD 100 million directly and indirectly,” he added.
Ashenafi said that avoiding the use of MB has also significant contributions for bottlers since they save unnecessary production cost.
“It has a massive impact on forward and backward linkage,” he added.
Currently, there are 107 water bottlers in different corners of the country.

A national coffee symposium has been held in Mizan Amman city, the capital of one of the newly launched South West Region.

In the forum low productive performance, domestic price inflation and the inability to provide quality and compatible coffee with private suppliers, as well as the long process of export trade were mentioned as challenges that the unions are facing.
In a study conducted by the federal cooperative commission, only 65 percent of coffee from the plan is amassed from unions. It has also been stated that the

amount of coffee that unions are exporting is decreasing from time to time.
As indicated by the commission, discussions are underway for coffee producer cooperatives to get a better price for their products by offering a natural and traceable product to the foreign market.
25 agricultural cooperatives engaged in coffee export participated in the exhibition. Beside coffee producers various spices and honey producers participate in the exhibition.