#growing affluence

Not surprisingly, growing affluence around Asia has seen Big Booze expand its presence in the region, with giants such as Diageo, the company that owns Guinness, as well as Dutch beer behemoth Heineken, setting up new ventures in the region in recent years. Heineken even opened a brewery near Timor Leste’s capital, Dili, a city of around 250,000 people in a country of only 1.2 million. “Advertisements and marketing in general has an important role in this: it depicts the image of a desirable ‘modern’, Western-oriented lifestyle to countries, which had been predominantly abstaining,” Dr Jürgen Rehm said.