China Mobile is the most valuable telecoms brand in Asia-Pacific, and the third most valuable in the world, according to Brand Finance's latest Telecoms 300 brand value report.
China Mobile's brand value has increased 4.6% in 2019 to $53.22 billion, cementing its position behind AT&T ($87 billion) and Verizon ($71.15 billion) on the top 20 leaderboard.
Other Asia-Pacific operators in the top 20 include Japan's NTT Group (5th with a brand value of $41.67 billion), China Telecom (9th, $20.63 billion), Japan's SoftBank (10th, $19.29 billion) and au (11th, $16.62 billion), Australia's Telstra (14th, $10.5 billion), and China Unicom (16th, $10.23 billion).
But with the exception of China Mobile and au, whose position on the leaderboard remained unchanged, all the Asia-Pacific operators in the list fell either one or two places.
Further down the list, Vietnam's Viettel had a strong performance, with its brand value increasing by 36% to $4.3 billion, while Ooredoo increased to 41st on the top 50 rankings with a 12% increase in brand value to $3.78 billion.
The report also ranked telecoms brands by relative strength based on metrics including marketing investment, stakeholder equity, and business performance.
By these criteria, Thailand's AIS was named the world's strongest telecoms brand, overtaking China Mobile. Malaysia's Digi was ranked as the third largest brand, while relative newcomer Reliance Jio Infocomm from India was named fifth. Telkom Indonesia (8th) and Singtel (9th) also made the top 10.