Year-ender: Chinese brands

This was the landscape of the China BrandZ™ Top 10 Most Valuable Brands for 2011, with China Mobile on top of the list by $53,607 million, tailed by Industrial and Commercial Bank of China and China Construction Bank.

These three brands stay on the top of the list this year, despite their brand value declining, except for CCB.

Meanwhile, State-owned enterprises Agricultural Bank of China, Bank of China and Sinopec slipped in the ranking. PetroChina was left off the list, while privately owned firms Baidu and Tencent are rising.

Baidu and Tencent are among the 14 Chinese brands whose brand value is increasing, according to the Top 50 Most Valuable Chinese Brands, whereas 30 declined and 2 remained unchanged.

We also have four newcomers joining the top 50 ranking this year, with Bank of Communications leading the group by $4,958 million.

Chinese brands are beefing up their overseas expansion, and Western consumers are increasingly starting to recognize them.

Based on the revenue created outside of the Chinese mainland, Lenovo Group Ltd was the big winner as the manufacturer overtook US-based Hewlett-Packard Corp, or HP, in the third quarter to become the world's largest PC seller by shipments.

As encouraging as it is, there are challenges. Doreen Wang, head of branding with the market research agency Millward Brown China, said Chinese brands have to achieve consistent quality, create an emotional connection, and establish trust in a global economy where a product's provenance is often less important than its quality, design and value.

In this case, Chinese companies, still in the infancy of global brand building, will have much to learn and a long and winding road to travel if they are to achieve success.