The world’s most valuable brand is owned by a company that you likely interact with every day. In fact, you may have even gotten to this web page using it.
Today’s infographic comes from HowMuch.net, a cost information site, and it breaks down Brand Finance’s list of the top 500 brands in a different way. It shows the most valuable brand for each country, and has each country sized accordingly to the dollar value of that company.
It’s interesting to note the drop off in value from country to country.
Google is the world’s most valuable brand at $109.5 billion – and it is followed closely by other U.S. brands like Apple ($107.1B) or Amazon ($106.4B). However, there are only two non-U.S. brands in the top 10, which are South Korean conglomerate Samsung ($66.2B) and Chinese bank ICBC ($47.8B).
Third on the list by country is ICBC, a Chinese bank, valued at $47.8 billion. Banks are the most prominent businesses on the map, topping the most-valued brand list in no less than 8 countries. Only one has truly global name recognition: Spain's Santander, the second-biggest bank on the map.
The others are big at home, but less well-known abroad: the Royal Bank of Canada; Russia's Sberbank; Itaú in Brazil; and the acronymical DBS, QNB and KBC in Singapore, Qatar and Belgium, respectively. Hong Kong-based insurance giant AIA completes the financial services-segment.
Despite the current slump in hydrocarbon prices, oil and gas companies top the list of most valued brands in no less than seven countries. The biggest one is Shell, based in the Netherlands and valued at $36.8 billion. Shell is more than triple the size of Eni in Italy or Petronas in Malaysia, and the rest of the oil-and-gas giants is valued in only single-billion-dollar digits: Mexico's PEMEX, Norway's Statoil, Thailand's PTT and Ecopetrol in Colombia. Each, however, is big enough to cast a shadow over any other company in each of those countries.
The U.S. is way ahead of other countries in its corporate dominance of the online world (see also Apple and Amazon, for that matter). But in five other countries, the most valued brand emanates from the related telecommunications sector.
Vodafone (UK) and Orange (France) are virtually the same size, and lead the list, followed by Telstra from Australia, STC from Saudi Arabia and Telkom Indonesia. Finland's Nokia and Taiwan Semiconductor are the only other brands directly linked to the ICT sector – of course besides conglomerates like Tata (India), which have their fingers in many pies.
As all of the brands on this map know, the market is volatile and their survival is precarious. Huge, wealthy brands can stumble and shrink to a ghost of their former selves.
One major reason why brands rise and fall is the fact that their capital is more than just brand value – how much money they are worth – but also brand strength: a more ephemeral quality, linked to consumer confidence in the brand, but also the effect brand recognition has on investors, regulators, and the brand's own staff, among others.
Will they be on next year's most-valuable brands per country map? Only time will tell...
Source : Visual Capitalist, howmuch.net
