On May 15, the 20th anniversary celebration of Kantar BrandZ's Most Valuable Global Top 100 Brands List was held, and the "2025 Kantar BrandZ's Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands" list was officially released. Apple ranked first with a brand value of US$1.3 trillion for four consecutive years, followed by Google, Microsoft and Amazon. A total of 12 Chinese brands including Tencent, Huawei, Haier, etc. were selected into the top 100. The total value of Chinese brands on the list increased by 26%, ranking second in the world. Among them, Haier has been on the list as the only Internet of Things ecological brand in the world for seven consecutive years, and its brand value has achieved continuous growth of more than 47%.

  Seven times the only one, brand value has been rising year by year

  Since 1998, Kantar BrandZ has surveyed more than 4.5 million consumers in 54 markets around the world, involving more than 20,000 brands.

  This year marks the 20th anniversary of the release of Kantar BrandZ's top 100 global brands. The list report of Kantar BrandZ's top 100 most valuable global brands in 2025 deeply analyzes the changes in brand marketing over the past 20 years, elaborates on the importance of brand value in many aspects such as market competition, consumer awareness and long-term development of the company, and provides the industry with valuable insights and references.

  In 2025, the total value of the top 100 brands in the world reached US$10.7 trillion, a year-on-year increase of 29%, setting a record high. This significant growth is mainly due to the strong performance of technology-driven disruptive brands, which have always been the main driving force for value growth in various industries over the past 20 years.

  The report shows that China's brand value is becoming increasingly prominent, doubling in the past 20 years, and currently accounts for 6% of the total value of the world's top 100 brands. Among the 12 Chinese brands on the list this year, Haier maintains a trend of continuous increase in ranking and brand value. Since entering the top 100 most valuable global brands for the first time in 2019, Haier's global ranking has gradually risen from the original 89th to the 54th place, with a brand value of US$47.6 billion, a year-on-year increase of 47%, setting a new record.

  Wang Xing, CEO of Kantar Group Greater China and Global Chairman of Kantar BrandZ, pointed out, "As an authoritative list in the field of global brand value evaluation, we have seen the ups and downs of brands in the past 20 years. Haier has developed from a local brand in Qingdao to a well-known Chinese brand, and has become a world brand, until it transforms into an ecological brand. It is not easy to go all the way. Now Haier has truly established an excellent localized world-class brand."

  In 2024, Haier Group achieved global revenue of 401.6 billion yuan, an increase of 8% year-on-year; total global profits of 30.2 billion yuan, an increase of 13% year-on-year, emerging a sustained and steady upward growth curve. As one of the earliest companies to go global to create brands, Haier has ranked first in retail sales of large home appliance brands in the world for 16 consecutive years, and has a significant trend of continuous growth.

  Focusing on the three major tracks, ecological brands continue to evolve

  The steady growth of Haier's brand value is due to its deep strategic cultivation of ecological brands. It continues to meet the personalized needs of global users with innovation-driven development, and leads industrial transformation with leading ecological practices and builds growth resilience through time-track cycles.

  "There are no successful companies, only companies of the times." In the context of the Internet of Things era, all enterprises need to transform into an open ecosystem, and products are replaced by scenarios and industries are “recovered” by the ecosystem, which has become the general trend. Haier continues to focus on industry and lays out three major tracks: smart housing ecology, big health industry ecology and digital economy industry ecology.

  In the field of smart living, Haier, from traditional home appliances to smart home appliances, from smart homes to smart life, Haier Smart Home is committed to becoming the world's largest home ecological company with market value. Haier's first scene brand, Sanyi Bird, has reached 10 million daily active users, providing users with the best experience of life scenarios in interconnection. At the same time, Haier Robot is also continuing to go deep into core scenarios such as unmanned housework and health care, relying on the integration of multimodal perception and interaction to provide more personalized services, creating lifelong users through continuous interaction and experience iteration with users.

  As Zhou Yunjie, Chairman and CEO of Haier Group, said, Haier is a entrepreneurship spirit passed down from generation to generation and an endless entrepreneurial ecology. Today, Haier has become an ecological platform. In addition to the smart living ecology, it has also opened up a big health industry ecology and a digital economy industry ecology.

  In the big health industry ecosystem, Haier has shown its strategic courage to create the "second curve". In just five years, from the research and development of life science equipment to the construction of clinical medical ecology, to the 12.5 billion stake in Shanghai Lais to improve the blood industry chain, Haier Yingkang has formed a complete ecological layout covering the three major industries of life sciences, clinical medicine, and biotechnology. In 2024, the industry scale exceeded 10 billion, becoming a leading enterprise in the domestic medical and health industry.

  In the digital economy industry ecosystem, Haier focuses on the Kaos Industrial Internet Platform, Haina Cloud, Katachi, Haier New Energy, etc., and strives to build an industrial Internet ecosystem from both supply and demand. As the world's leading industrial Internet platform, Haier Kaos has linked 900,000 companies and served 160,000 companies, empowering to build 12 world "beacon factories" and providing smart solutions for the digital transformation of traditional manufacturing. Recently, Haier has continued to make moves in the digital economy track: first, it has strategically invested in Xinshida, entered the industrial automation and industrial robot track, and further improved the ecological layout of the industrial Internet; then acquired Autohome, expanded the automotive industry ecosystem, and built a smart life scenario of "home-car Internet". Through a continuously open ecosystem, Haier is attracting more partners and developers to join to maximize the long-term ecological value.

  Zhou Yunjie said that Haier in the ecological environment is not only the soil for Haier's evolution, but also the direction of Haier's continuous development. The gradual improvement of ecological layout has enabled Haier to achieve three-dimensional leadership in a way that breaks and upgrades dimensions, and has also promoted ecological transformation to become an innovative path for global enterprises to explore sustainable development in the era of the Internet of Things.

  Embrace AI in-depth and reshape user experience with innovation

  The era of artificial intelligence is an opportunity for Chinese companies. Zhou Yunjie mentioned, "Enterprises either evolve with AI or are marginalized by AI." Haier takes the initiative to seize this opportunity of the times, and Zhou Yunjie sets 2025 as the first year of Haier's AI application, promoting the embracing AI by all employees, comprehensively and in the entire process, focusing on layout at four levels: basic foundation, AI ecology, vertical domain model, and business scenarios, and widely applying AI technology to the three major tracks of smart residence, big health and industrial Internet to help industrial transformation and upgrading.

  At the strategic implementation level, Haier follows the path of "main planning and step-by-step implementation" to deeply integrate AI into its core business. On the one hand, we will promote the comprehensive AIization of the main business processes, fully embrace AI in R&D, supply chain, sales and marketing, etc., and open up the full process data from R&D to procurement, production and consumption; on the other hand, we will promote the transformation of business models from "massive manufacturing" to "massive customization". Based on the data connection of the entire process, relying on AI to automatically predict order demand and dynamically adjust capacity allocation based on user data. Taking the Tianzhi Industrial Big Model created by Kaos as an example, it has accumulated 4,700 industry mechanism models and 200 expert algorithms, and has been applied in the fields of home appliances, automobiles, electronics, chemicals, etc., promoting the intelligent transformation of R&D design, production and manufacturing, business management and other links.

  This series of technical layouts has always revolved around the needs of "people". Haier has always been user-centered to maximize the value of people. Zhou Yunjie pointed out that the needs of users in the AI ​​era are undergoing three important changes: from "product function" to "experience sovereignty", from "passive acceptance" to "participation in co-creation", and from "functional satisfaction" to "emotional value". The iterative upgrade of user needs has also prompted Haier to boldly innovate in brand interaction methods.

  Since the beginning of this year, Haier's executive team has successively opened personal IP accounts on social media, interacting with users at close distance, understanding users' needs feedback in a timely manner, and quickly transforming them into product innovation to create tangible value for users. The recently launched "lazy washing machine" is a typical case. In response to the pain points of users' "classified clothing washing and care", Haier invited users to participate in product function design and quickly launched a three-tube washing machine, and the orders made in a week exceeded 88,000.

  Haier's practice has proved that in the AI ​​era, only by deeply rooting user needs in technological innovation and allowing every iteration to respond to real life scenarios can we achieve the symbiosis and growth of brand value and user experience, and enterprises can truly become "enterprises of the times".

  Seven times have been ranked the world's only IoT ecological brand, which is not only a proof of Haier's global influence, but also a demonstration of the global competitiveness of Chinese brands. From the leading layout of the Internet of Things ecosystem, to the coordinated evolution of the three major industrial ecosystems, to the value co-creation in the AI ​​era, Haier's path to brand advancement is essentially a paradigm breakthrough for Chinese companies from "products going overseas" to "ecological going overseas", and also provides Chinese companies with practical paths and value coordinates that can be learned from when they move to the world-class.

[Editor in charge: Ran Xiaoning]