Haier

30 June London time. WPP, the world's largest communications services group, together with its insights and consulting company Kantar, unveiled its prestigious BrandZ Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands ranking for 2020. The ranking was announced online this year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands 2020 represent a combined brand value of $5 trillion, comparable to Japan’s GDP, with Amazon crowning the list. As many as 17 China brands made onto the list this year, with Alibaba and Tencent leading the pack in 6th and 7th place, respectively. Notably, Haier again starred the list as the only IoT ecosystem brand with its brand value rising from $16.3 billion in 2019 to this year’s $18.7 billion, and its rank on the list from 89th to 68th.

By leveraging BrandZ’s prestigious brand valuation methodology and massive data assets, the list has always been on top of the global brand innovation and has become the only brand ranking that incorporates consumer insights, making it a barometer in the global brand landscape. Each year BrandZ has a separate award for the most prominent brand in brand equity development on its annual 100-place list. The special award for this year went to Haier as the world’s first recipient of the “IoT Ecosystem Brand”, recognizing it as a trailblazer for the ecosystem branding strategy of the IoT era. 

The creation of the “IoT ecosystem” category in 2019 showed Kantar’s acute insight into an important emerging trend in the business world. Furthermore, Haier’s continuing to stand as the only brand in the category demonstrated Kantar’s continued recognition of the value of an IoT ecosystem brand based on its authoritative brand evaluation system and Haier’s sustained lead in the field. Over the past year, Haier has also compellingly demonstrated the charm and value of an IoT ecosystem brand through its outstanding response to global challenges including the COVID-19 pandemic.  

Against the backdrop of the overall decline of the global home appliance industry in 2019, Haier Smart Home under Haier Group still managed to report a positive growth in both revenue and net profit, with its ecosystem revenue amounting to RMB4.8 billion, up 68% year-on-year. Haier’s COSMOPlat, a standard-setter and dominating player in the global mass customization space, has delivered enormous value in fighting COVID-19, facilitating resumption of work and production, and accelerating business transformation of SMEs. Haier Biomedical, a leader in applying chilled storage technology to biosafety and IoT, delivered a 32.74% revenue growth in the first quarter of this year and a whopping 92.6% y-o-y revenue growth in overseas markets. 

Haier attributes its robust development as an ecosystem brand to the RenDanHeYi Model conceived by its founder Mr. ZHANG Ruimin, which encourages each employee to maximize their personal value by creating maximum value for customers and has endowed Haier with “resilience in strategy, flexibility in organization, and elasticity in mechanism”. 

Haier expects the RenDanHeYi Model to continue to drive its growth as a use case and ecosystem-focused brand in the unfolding IoT era which will see use scenarios take precedence over products and ecosystem over industry. 

As a use-scenario brand, Haier is committed to providing users with enabling solutions for their pursuit of a beautiful life; as an ecosystem brand, Haier is on mission to empower other industries and businesses in an inclusive win-win spirit and work in conjunction with ecosystem partners to deliver value for users so as to build an evolving ecosystem like a tropical rainforest that lives on.