A report on the top brands in the world is dominated by tech companies, and Amazon is the biggest mover among them, with a 41-percent jump in brand value in the past year according to WPP and Kantar Millward Brown.
With a value of $139.3 billion, Amazon ranks fourth among the top 10 in the 2017 BrandZ Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands report, a 12-year-old study into brand value. Nine of those 10 companies are tech-related, with Google, Apple and Microsoft in the top three spots and Facebook, AT&T, Visa Payments, Tencent and IBM among the others.
The value of technology companies, at $1.2 trillion, easily outpaced other categories such as retail, regional banks, fast food and others. In fact, of the seven companies listed as newcomers to the top 100, valued at $120.7 billion, six are tech companies: Xfinity (No. 23), YouTube( No. 65), Hewlett Packard (No. 76), Salesforce (No. 90), Netflix (No. 92), Snapchat (No. 93).
Among the brands with the biggest year-over-year value changes, sports apparel company Adidas was tops with a 58-percent increase. But Amazon was singled out as “the brand that virtually invented e-commerce and disrupted retail” as the report said that the tech giant “is aiming to disrupt other categories, including cars and technologies associated with the cloud or the Internet of Things.”
Elsewhere on the top 100 list, Seattle-based coffee giant Starbucks comes in at No. 22; Bellevue, Wash.-based wireless carrier T-Mobile ranks at No. 25; and Costco, the warehouse-style retail chain, is No. 68.
Microsoft, which is currently tops among 10 brands in the business-to-business category, was at the top of the global top 10 back in 2006, with a value at the time of $62 billion. Google now heads the field at $245.5 billion. IBM is the only other holdover from that 10-year-old class.
