Apple is world's most valuable brand, beating Google and Facebook

Apple is the world's most valuable brand. In its annual hit parade of brands, marketing company Millward Brown Optimor places Apple at number one -- ending Google's four-year spell at the top of a chart that this year includes Facebook for the first time.

The BrandZ Top 100 is dominated by technology companies, with Apple and Google at the top and Facebook zooming in at number 35. McDonald's, Marlboro and Coca-Cola are the only non-tech names in the top 10. Honestly, as if it's bad enough spelling it BrandZ, it's pronounced, unforgivably, 'BrandZee'.

Apple is enjoying a barnstorming couple of years with the launch of the iPhone 4 and the iPad, which single-handedly created the market for consumer tablets rivals are scrambling to enter.

The fruit-flavoured phone flogger has made an eye-watering £3.6bn profit this year alone, and the Jobsian brand doesn't seem to have suffered too much from controversy over the iPhone's dodgy antenna, while the revelation that the iPhone tracks your movements almost certainly happened too recently to affect the chart. Apple has now scaled back the controversial tracking feature with the minimum of fuss.

The chart is worked out by the highly scientific method of interviewing consumers for their perceptions of different brands, combined with data on the financial performance of the companies to come up with a figure of what the brand is worth -- what the chartmakers call 'brand equity'. Apple's brand equity measures roughly £93bn, with the good name of Google being worth around £67bn.

Here's the top 10 technology companies, comprising an interesting mix of hardware, software and online outfits:

The Most Valuable Global Technology Brands 2011

Chinese-language search engine Baidu is the only non-Western entry to the top 10, while business software giant SAP is the only European brand present. Apple, Google, IBM, Microsoft, HP, Oracle and Facebook are all Yanks. The BlackBerry brand is owned by Canadian firm Research In Motion.

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