BUSINESS AND FINANCE

BRAND DESIGNS TOP 500 TELECOMS BRAND RANKING

Telecoms companies invest considerable sums in their brands, with mixed fortunes. Our exclusive ranking with Brand Finance tracks the risers and fallers. By Ian Kemp

products covered in breadcrumbs or batter he planned to call them battered cod pieces. Fifty-five years later, after workers voted down that name, fish fingers (or fish sticks in the US) are one of the best known and consumed fast food products. Telecoms companies know the value of

I

their brands and are prepared to spend big to maintain them. When Bharti Airtel in February announced a 43% year-on- year decline in net profits in its third quarter, it attributed the fall in large part to a 3.4 billion rupee expense related to the relaunch of its brand across markets, including its Africa operations bought from Zain last year for US$10.7 billion. Specialist brand valuation

company

Brand Finance has compiled a Top 500 ranking of global telecoms brands for Total Telecom: On the opposite page we list the leading 200 companies, and break out the top 100 mobile brands (excluding handset companies) on p.8; for the complete ranking visit www.brandirectory.com. This year the total brand value of the top 500 companies is US$513.9 billion, up

t pays to think of the long term before you establish a brand. When Clarence Birdseye first had the idea for fish

15.5% from $445.1 billion last year. The consultancy goes through a comprehen- sive set of steps to arrive at each company’s valuation (see box on p.10 for a full expla- nation of methodology). Each brand is accorded a brand rating—a benchmark- ing study of the strength, risk and future potential of a brand relative to its compet- itors—as well as a brand value: in short, a summary measure of the historical and future financial strength of the brand. For the third year running Vodafone is

the top ranked telecoms company in the Brand Finance survey . Contributing to that success is the operator’s subscriber growth in international markets— subscribers in India grew to 123.4 million in its third quarter ending 31 December 2010 up from 91.4 million a year earlier, for example—as well as strong data serv- ices uptake. Vodafone’s group data revenues grew to £1.33 billion in the third quarter from £1.05 billon a year earlier; the quarter marked the first time that data revenues exceeded messaging reve- nues, which stood at £1.32 billion. Apple, which did not appear in our list

last year—and is therefore not in our list of ranking winners (see table below)—is a significant new entry at number 15 in this

‘Nokia’s brand value may have fallen in recent years but brand remains one of its key assets’

Top Ten: Ranking Winners 1

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10 6

Movistar Verizon AT&T

Vodafone

NTT Docomo NTT

T-Mobile Rogers

Softbank Centurylink Company name

Change in Brand Value (US$ millions)

5,269 4,265 2,299 1,679 1,614 1,536 1,427 1,299 1,048 918

AIS

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

TDS Boost Mobile

Telekom Polska Millicom Intl

Telekom Austria Orascom OTE

Telefonica Nokia

year’s ranking. In the past year it has almost doubled its worldwide sales of iPhones to end users, according to Gartner, from 24.89 million in 2009 to 46.60 million in 2010. Its share of the global handsets market rose from 2.1% to 2.9%, enabling it to leapfrog Motorola and Sony Ericsson and move into fifth position behind Blackberry maker Research In Motion (see p.20). Those two companies have had a nega-

tive impact on another big brand, Nokia, which demonstrates how quickly a decline in fortunes can occur. Nokia has fallen from the top ranked telecoms brand in Brand Finance’s 2008 survey to eleventh place this year, buffeted by Apple and RIM in the high-end smartphones market. “Meanwhile Chinese manufac- turers swallowed Nokia’s share of low-end handset sales, leaving the company squeezed in the middle and customers with a poor understanding of what the brand stands for as [services] like N-Gage [gaming] and Comes with Music failed to stick,” says Xander Bird, a brand valua- tion director at Brand Finance. Nokia in January stopped selling Ovi

Music Unlimited (formerly Comes With Music) with its handsets in 27 of 33 coun- tries in which it was available; the company’s share of the total handset market fell from 36.4% in 2009 to 28.9% last year, while its share of smartphones

Top Ten: Ranking Losers 10

Company name

Change in Brand Value (US$ millions)

-679 -771 -851 -915 -964

-1,149 -1,517 -2,203 -6,689 -9,900

www.totaltele.com March 2011