Amazon beats Apple: The price to be paid if brands were on sale

Amazon's founder Jeff Bezos seems to be on a roll. After becoming a 12-figure billionaire and leading all the rich lists, his company is now the most valuable brand in the world, toppling Google from its perch, which was the most valuable brand last year and making sure Apple stays put as the runners-up.

Indian brands would rather forget the last year, considering that most have slipped up in the pecking order, with no Indian brand in the top 100 - the closest being the Tatas at 104, and even they would rather not gloat about it.

While American companies continue their stranglehold on the most valuable brands, their share has fallen in the last decade. Chinese companies, which a decade back were a speck on the horizon of most valuable brands, are now second only to the US.

For the first time, the top 8 most valuable brands in the world are technology companies, which capture nearly a quarter of the total value of the world's most valuable brands.

The old economy brands, notably automobiles and oil & gas, come up tops in Europe and Latin America, while telecom is the front runner across West Asia, Africa and Australasia.