Louis Vuitton is the world’s most valuable luxury brand. Its products include leather goods, handbags, trunks, shoes, watches, jewelry and accessories. Most of these are adorned with the LV monogram. It is one of the most profitable brands in the world with profit margins approaching 40%. Long-time creative director Marc Jacobs left Louis Vuitton in 2013 after 16 years in charge of the brand. He plans to focus on his own Marc Jacobs line, which is also owned by Louis Vuitton parent LVMH
Samsung had the strongest one-year growth of any brand in the top 100. The value is up 136% over the past 3 years. Sales for Samsung’s Galaxy S4 smartphone have been on fire and the company also benefits from its market leading position with memory chips. Samsung’s smartphone shipments rose 40% to 81.2 million in the third quarter, according to IDC. Its 31.4% market share is larger than the next four brands combined
Intel is the only brand in the top 10 to see its value decline. Intel and Microsoft dominated the PC world, but both have struggled with the rise of tablets and smartphones as consumer’s computing technology choice
GE has experienced sluggish growth in recent years, but its order backlog hit a record $229 billion in the 3rd quarter. U.S. orders rose 18% and they were up 17% in Europe despite the weak economy. GE has leveraged its role as an Olympic sponsor to spur lucrative contracts around energy, health care and water treatment. The 2008 Beijing Olympics generated $700 million in sales for the brand
McDonald’s is constantly under fire for its unhealthy menu options, but the vastness of the brand is staggering. It feeds 69 million people a day at its 34,000 restaurants across 119 countries. The 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, will mark the 10th straight Games that McDonald’s is the official restaurant
Google is the generic term for the search category, but what separates Google from brands like Kleenex and Xerox is theamount of money it generates. The Google brand generated more than $13 billion in earnings before interest and taxes in 2012
The brand fell on hard times in the 1990s, but it has reinvented itself over the past two decades as a powerful brand in tech as a software and services giant. It has racked up the most U.S. patents for 20 straight years. IBM features its innovations in its People for a Smarter Planet ad campaign
Coca-Cola sold 13.5 billion cases of its signature brand in 2012, up 3% from the prior year thanks to growth outside the U.S. Those sales represent half of the company’s total soda revenue. The brand became the first to record 50 million “likes” on Facebook last year
The value of the brand is flat over the past three years as Microsoft struggles to make the transition to a mobile world. Growth has slowed, but it is still one of the most profitable brands in the world with operating margins of 34% in the latest fiscal year. The company’s $2.6 billion ad budget is one of the biggest in tech
The Apple brand is worth nearly twice as much as any other brand on the planet by our count. The company sold a record 33.8 million iPhones in its latest quarter. It also moved 14.1 million iPads and 4.6 million Macs