Roger Fingas
For the fourth year in a row, Interbrand has ranked Apple as the most valuable brand in the world, though the company didn't chart in a list of the fastest-growing brands.
Apple's valuation rose 5 percent year-over-year to more than $178.1 billion, keeping it ahead of companies like Google, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, and Toyota. Google in fact ranked a distant second at just under $133.3 billion.
The fastest-growing brands were led by Facebook, Amazon, and Lego, up 48 percent, 33 percent, and 25 percent, respectively. By this metric Apple was easily surpassed by two of its key rivals, Samsung and Google, which advanced by 14 and 11 percent.
Interbrand credited Apple's hold at the top to a mix of "superior products" and a "functionally integrated" hardware/software model, which draws people into the Apple ecosystem and deters people from considering other platforms, also making them willing to pay high prices for the experience.
"And the more data you share, the more personal it becomes — adding new devices is painless and the thought of switching increasingly unpromising," Interbrand said.
Apple's brand improvement comes despite iPhone revenues actually declining year-over-year for the first time in 2016, which in turn led to the company's first revenue drop in 13 years.
Malcolm Owen
Amber Neely
William Gallagher
5 Comments
Samsung: +14%... and just couple of hours ago yet another one of their Galaxy Note 7s explodes onboard a Southwest 737 airliner in Chicago.
With such explosive growth + a new line of exploding smartphones, Samsung could very well corner the airline terrorism industry by year's end...
:o
and according to USA today, the traveller who owned the phone states that it was the newer replaced version of the phone! ridiculous!