For all their recent growth, the economies in India and China have barely started to produce globally respected brands. Brand Finance, a UK company, found that the top six brands in the world are American (Wal-mart, Coca Cola, IBM, Microsoft, Google, General Electric). Thirteen of the top 20 brands are American and 177 of the top 500 most valued brands belong to US companies. The sole China company is the telecom carrier China Mobile. From India, they rank the Tata group (which is actually a 91 separate companies).
While we agree that the West dominates brands, IP and profits, we think Brand Finance is exagerrating the important of western brands. A more balance approach would likely have brough Tata Steel, Tata Motors, and Tata Tea as separate brands. In China, Haier and Huawei are very strong forces and must surely rank in the top 500 worldwide. So would Indian brands such as State Bank, ICICI and Reliance.
