Google and Apple, know your place! Amazon is most valuable brand!
Just when you thought Amazon couldn’t possibly become bigger – it has now become the most valuable brand there is!
According to Kantar, the world famous global ranking company, and its database site BrandZ, Amazon has surpassed the likes of Google and Apple as the world’s most valuable brand, sitting at 315,5$ billion, over 52% from last year. Apple comes in second at 309,5$ billion, and Google in third place with a company value of 309$ billion.
This surprising change on the leaderboard comes after 12 years in which Google and Apple traded blows in order to be named the most valuable company in the world.
“It was not a surprise, but it was not inevitable”, David Roth, CEO at BrandZ, who also added that “few could have predicted the company’s success when it was just an online bookseller in the 1990s. With its devotion to removing friction from every part of the customer experience, Amazon has changed what consumers expect from brands. With its pioneering efforts in cloud computing, Amazon has changed what businesses expect from their suppliers and partners”.
One reason Bezos’s company tops the list is that it’s dominating a variety of retail categories and offering more and more services that are in touch with their customers’ needs, thus positioning itself to become much more than an online retailer.
In the past year, the company has invested billions of dollars in new ventures, including Aurora, the self-driving car start-up, PillPack, the online pharmacy, food-delivery company Deliveroo, a new headquarters, electric truck start-up Rivian, and Project Kuiper, which would provide high-speed internet service via thousands of satellites.
Diversifying its service palette has helped Amazon build support from all over the world, on different areas, which in turn created a strong emulation between Amazon users and the e-commerce platform.
This great news for Amazon comes just six months after it was named the most valuable public company in the USA, stealing Microsoft’s spot which they held since November of last year.
Being the most valuable publicly traded US company, with a market capitalization of $790 billion versus its competitor’s $785 billion, Amazon shows just how much a company can grow from a small business entity to a global mammoth.
Founded by the world’s richest man – Jeff Bezos – as an online bookstore, the Seattle-based online retailer has seen its brand value quintuple in the past five years. Amazon has expanded into grocery, healthcare, food delivery and, with its Alexa devices, even voice recognition. This is a sign that the company has a fantastic brand stretch across a lot of different categories of products and services.
“Amazon has played the game very well: the central proposition of its brand is that it removes friction from everything you do, making it easier, cheaper and faster to buy a product or use the cloud”, said David Roth, the chairman of BrandZ.
Not everyone is pleased with this, though, as US President Donald Trump has expressed his concern over the success of mammoth companies such as Amazon, Google, Apple and Facebook.
“There is something going on in terms of monopoly”, Donald Trump told CNBC in an interview.
As a result of Amazon’s success, the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice could soon open antitrust investigations into big tech companies.
The top ten most valuable global brands in the report is made up almost entirely of technology and telecom companies, with Microsoft, Visa, Facebook, Alibaba Group, Tencent, McDonald’s, and AT&T rounding off the top ten after Amazon, Apple, and Google.
