U$A! U$A! American Firms Dominate Most Valuable List
Last week we told you how, according to British consulting firm Brand Finance, Danish toymaker Lego had surpassed Italian toymaker Ferrari as the “World’s Most Powerful Brand.” That ranking had little to do with what the Danes could squat, clean or jerk, and said more about how the brand was perceived by consumers.
Now there’s another Brand Finance list, this one dealing much more in concrete numbers, the kind that come prefaced with dollar signs. And what this list has to tell us is that that for all the talk of emerging markets in Asia, the Subcontinent, South America, etc., it’s the U.S. that still dominates in the creation, growth and maintenance of the world’s biggest businesses.
Eight of the 10 companies on BF’s “World’s Most Valuable Brands” list call the states home led by—Surprise!—Apple which at a 2015 valuation of $128 billion far-outdistanced Korean second-place finisher Samsung which checks in at tidy $81 billion. Only one other non-American firm made the list: China Mobile which placed ninth ($48 billion).
American firms Google ($77 billion), Microsoft ($67 billion), Verizon ($60 billion), AT&T ($59 billion), Amazon ($56 billion), General Electric ($48 billion) and Walmart ($47 billion) not only dominate the list but offer a pretty clear road map of how a business achieves world class level success i.e. if you want to make billions and billions, best to go into tech and it would not hurt to offer a jazzy phone or two.
That point was driven home by yet another Brand Finance list—what do these people do all day?—this one ranking the world’s fastest growing brands. Six of the 10 names on that list are tech companies led by U.S.-based Twitter which, according to BF, grew by 185 percent last year. China tech giant Baidu was next having grown 161 percent though, at $13 billion, it’s more than three times as valuable as Twitter ($4 billion).
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