Samsung emerges Africa’s most admired brand
African Business magazine in partnership with Brand Africa, Brand Finance, GeoPoll and Kantar TNS has released the results of the Top 100 brands in Africa.
Samsung has unseated MTN as Africa’s most admired brand. Despite its recent crisis with its Galaxy Note 7 model, which notably was never launched in Africa, Samsung takes the #1 spot as the Most Admired Brand in Africa. However, MTN has retained its ranking as the Most Admired African Brand despite challenges particularly in Nigeria, which have knocked some shine off Africa’s leading brand.
The big story in this year’s ranking is the fall in the number of African brands in the Top 100. Only 16 African brands are represented a fall from 25 two years ago. This shows that African brands need to work much harder at becoming mainstream and building brand awareness. African brands, accounts for only 0.75% of the value of the Top 100 Most Valuable brands. That is in line with Africa having a mere 0.6% share of trademarks filed globally and where investments in R&D is less than 1% against of distribution of between 2-5% in developed markets. Among the 19 markets surveyed, non-African brands dominate the Top 3 in each market.
Because of the categories transformational impact in Africa, Brand Africa also conducted a separate parallel survey to determine the Most Admired Brands in Media and the Most Admired Brands in Financial Services. In the financial services category, Nigeria’s GTBank leads the overall rankings in Africa and Barclays retains its position as the number 1 non-African financial services brand. In the media category, BBC and DSTV retain their positions as the top non-African and African media brands respectively.
Africa’s Top Brands full results and analysis will be available in the March issue of African Business, which will be on sale globally from Monday 6th March.