Since 2010, Brand Finance has been compiling an
annual report on the most valuable and strongest telecoms brands. The company has assessed 5,000 of the world’s biggest telecom brands, including the leading 150 in their dedicated report, the Brand Finance Telecoms 150 2022.
Brand value is understood as the net economic benefit that a brand owner would achieve by licensing the brand in the open market. Brand strength is the efficacy of a brand’s performance on intangible measures relative to its competitors.
Let’s take a look at some of the most notable results.
Most valuable telecoms brand: Verizon
Verizon takes the top spot again this year, with the company’s brand value rising by 1% to $69.6 billion. This marks the third year running the company has taken first place in the report, having never fallen below third place since the report began.
Verizon’s rival’s Deutsche Telekom (T-Mobile) and AT&T take the second and third place positions, with valuations of $60.2 billion and $47 billion, respectively.
That the podium spots are dominated by primarily by US brands should come as little surprise. The market is not only huge, it is highly profitable, with mobile and broadband plans in the US some of the most expensive in the world. Despite enormous spectrum auctions and the expensive rollouts of 5G and fibre, the US telecoms market continues to exhibit healthy growth, providing the US operators a fertile landscape in which to grow their brand.
Fastest growing brand: Iliad Italia
Iliad Italia launched in May 2018, becoming the fourth mobile player in the Italian market behind TIM, Wind Tre, and Vodafone. Since then, the company has grown quickly, in summer last year claiming a 10% share of the Italian market just three years after launch. It currently has roughly 8 million subscribers and launched a promising fibre-to-the-home offering earlier this year.
According to Brand Finance’s report, the brand has risen in value by 109% to $447 million over the past year, making it the fastest growing brand in the telecoms industry.
In second place is Etisalat (now e&)’s brand Moov, which saw its brand value increase 104% to $453 million in the last year. This rapid rise comes as a result of e& uniting 11 of its African subsidiaries under the Moov Africa banner at the start of 2021.
In third place is Spanish mobile tower giant Cellnex, whose brand grew in value by 79% in the last year, following the closure of a huge amount of tower purchase deals across Europe worth roughly €10 billion. Just last week, Cellnex received the
green light to purchase CK Hutchison (Three)’s towers in the UK, having been in discussions with the Competitions and Markets Authority for almost a year.
Strongest telecoms brand: Etisalat
Using a combination of metrics including marketing investment, stakeholder equity, and business performance, Brand Finance has judged Etisalat to be the world’s strongest telecoms brand in 2022. Etisalat scored 89.2 out of 100 (an AAA rating) based on these metrics, having only broken into the top 20 in 2020.
Etisalat recently rebranded as e&, symbolising its corporate shift towards becoming a global technology and investment conglomerate.
“The transformation of e& from a telecom company founded more than four decades ago in the UAE into a global influence in digitalization highlights its role in upholding the UAE’s sustainable economic development and diversification plans,” said Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al-Nahyan, deputy prime minister of the UAE.
Naturally, this increase in brand value was also supported by its unified rebranding of its African assets into Moov Africa, as mentioned previously.
Second place and third place were taken by Swisscom (88.8) and PLDT (88.4) respectively.
You can see the full report from Brand Finance
here.
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