What Are the Most Valuable Chinese Brands?

Tencent is the Chinese brand with the highest brand value, with a ranking of the top 100 brands headquartered in the People's Republic released by Kantar BrandZ on September 10 scoring it at $129 billion. The company best known for its video game arm and the everything app WeChat managed to clinch the top spot for the fourth year in a row despite losing brand value compared to 2023. Many other top-ranking brands like ByteDance's Douyin and smartphone manufacturer Huawei increased their value by between eight and 52 percent.

A closer look at the ranking reveals that the eight brands with the highest value are mostly active in the tech sector. The outliers are Moutai, which is the name for a traditional Chinese liquor as well as the company closest associated with it, Kweichow Moutai. The brand comes in second with $87.3 billion. The other is the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), a state-owned public company considered the largest bank in the world in terms of held assets according to S&P Global, with a brand value of $28.5 billion. Overall, a third of the total calculated brand value of roughly $1 trillion can be attributed to companies in the media and entertainment and consumer technology sectors, followed by financial services, alcohol and retail.

Kantar defines brand value as the financial value of a brand, which means the proportion to which the brand contributes to the total value of the parent company, multiplied by the brand contribution, meaning how a brand drives the sales and therefore financial value of the company it belongs to. Looking at revenues paints a slightly different picture.

For example, even though Tencent ranks first in terms of brand value, its trailing twelve month revenue of $82.6 billion puts it at rank 18 in the 319 public companies from China listed on Companies Market Cap and at rank 106 from a global perspective. The most successful Chinese public company is Sinopec with revenues of $473.5 billion netting it the fifth spot out of over 9,000 companies list, but in terms of brand value, it only achieves the 22nd position.