Apple, Huawei Technologies and Xiaomi lead mainland China’s top brands based on domestic consumers’ online purchase behavior, according to the first such ranking carried out by Peking University. With the support of Taobao and Tmall Group (TTG), the domestic e-commerce unit of Alibaba Group Holding, the university released its findings in its “China’s Top 500 Online Consumer Brands List”. The rankings showed Apple with a 100-point score, while Huawei and Xiaomi notched scores of 95.3 and 95.1, respectively. Major domestic home appliance makers Midea Group and Haier took the fourth and fifth spots, while the world’s largest personal computer maker, Lenovo Group, ranked sixth. Mao-tai liquor producer Kweichou Moutai was in seventh place, while popular sportswear brands Nike, Li Ning and Adidas rounded out the list’s top 10 brands.
Domestic firms accounted for the largest proportion of brands on the list, with 344 among the top 500. In the subcategories of computers, communications and consumer electronics products (3C) and home appliances, the Peking University report found that little-known or obscure brands are “significantly less competitive” in the domestic market, compared to those that most consumers are knowledgeable about. “Companies like Apple, Huawei and Xiaomi dominate every subcategory,” the report said. The rankings reflect consumers' increased preference to buy brands they are most familiar with, which the Peking University report found to be a trend that has grown over the past several quarters.
The trend comes as China’s economy showed signs of recovery in the first three months of the year. First-quarter retail sales rose 4.6% from a year earlier, while the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) expanded by 5.4% in the same period to beat analysts’ estimates. The Peking University report’s China Online Consumer Brand Index, which assesses the average consumption quality levels across different product categories, recorded five consecutive quarters of year-on-year growth. That shows “an improvement in the overall rating of the national basket of consumer brands, indicating stable growth in consumption quality”, the report said. The report also found that domestic consumers have a growing appetite for hi-tech products, including robots. Unitree Robotics, a maker of humanoid robots, was the fastest-growing brand in the smart devices category, the South China Morning Post reports.
