GE, IBM Brand Values Take Big Hits

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jan 11, 4:47PM EST · Published Oct 7, 6:26AM EDT

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Interbrand has released its Best Global Brands 2018, the 19th installment of the study. The value of the great majority of the 100 brands rose from a year earlier. The value of a few brands fell, however. These were lead by International Business Machines Corp.’s (NYSE: IBM) IBM brand and General Electric Co.’s (NYSE: GE) GE brand.

Of all the brands on the Interbrand list, GE lost the most value, down 26% to $33 billion. Its stock price has dropped 43% in the past year. That is an amazing contrast to when GE was the largest conglomerate in the world and one of its most important corporations. GE recently dumped its CEO, who had held the job for only a year. At the same time the new CEO joined, GE said it would need to take a $23 billion write-down for its power services division. All that seems left for GE is to auction off divisions and become a company that is a fraction of its size a generation ago.

IBM has tried to morph into a cloud computing and AI company. The value of the IBM brand dropped 8% to $43 billion. The parent company has pushed a portion of these businesses under a new brand: Watson. This may be a sign that the IBM brand is too old and tarnished by the company’s performance. This has undermined this flagship brand of the very troubled company. The move to the new business sectors has not worked. The company continues to lag larger tech firms in the sector. IBM routinely hurdles press releases into the market as an attempt to promote its progress in cloud computing and AI. The campaigns have been no more successful than the businesses have been.

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Several other prominent brands lost value over the past year, according to Interbrand. The value of Coca-Cola dropped 5% to $66 billion. The value of the Oracle brand fell 5% to $26 billion. Zara’s brand valuation fell 5% to $18 billion. The value of Ikea dropped 5% to $17 billion. The value of Gillette dropped 7% to $17 billion. The value of H&M dropped 18% to $17 billion. The value of the eBay brand dropped 2% to $13 billion.

IBM and GE were once among the greatest brands in the history of American business. Those days are over.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.