Sri Lanka’s most valuable brands to be published for 15th year

Brand Finance Lanka the pioneering brand valuation and strategy firm, which launched Sri Lanka’s most valuable brands back in 2003, is gearing up to celebrate its 15th consecutive year of publishing its much sought after annual review of brands in April 2018.

“Since our first issue we have expanded the scope to reviewing as many as 100 brands and then widened our analysis to other product categories, thereby providing a comprehensive view of the Sri Lankan brand landscape,” said Brand Finance Lanka Managing Director Ruchi Gunewardene. “We use fact based methodologies in our approach, where market research is carried out amongst a large number of respondents. This provides us with the consumer sentiment through a brand equity score, that we use in our analysis and rankings.”

In addition to Sri Lanka’s most valuable consumer brands, other categories which are published include diversified corporate brands, export brands, multinational brands, e-commerce and most loved brands. The analysis and related articles are found in the Brands Annual, which is an LMD publication.

According to Gunewardene, this year, they will be providing a more comprehensive analysis of the performance of brands in key sectors. In addition to Sri Lanka’s most valuable 100 consumer brands, they will be publishing the results of the 20 most valuable conglomerate brands, which is a new addition. They will also be providing an in-depth analysis of performance by sectors, such as banking, insurance, other financial services, food and beverage amongst others.

“Because brands compete in their respective categories, we will be providing an analysis of how they are performing relative to each other. We have fact based information and past historical data to back our analysis and if companies require more information we can even provide an individual brand report. At the end of the day we want companies to be able to use this information for their brand strategising and planning purposes,” said Gunewardene. 

The market research is exclusively carried out by an independent market research agency for Brand Finance Lanka, and additional data such as financial performance, market share, growth, distribution amongst other indicators are gathered by a newly set up local analytics team.

Brand Finance Lanka’s local team has been strengthened with the appointment of a Valuation Manager Aliakber Alihussain and now includes a team of four analysts who are CIMA and ACCA qualified. This investment in people and training according to Gunewardene has been made in order to meet the growing demands for its consulting and valuation services.

“In previous years we carried out all the league table analysis in the UK, but in order to provide more detail in this year’s table and to meet up with the growing demand for consulting work, we have invested in people as well as training them both here and in London. They will be working in conjunction with the London office under their guidance. It’s important to take into consideration the Sri Lankan consumer and economic issues, and for this we need local talent,” concluded Gunewardene.

The BrandFinance most valuable brand measures the value and strength of 100 brands that are listed on the Colombo Stock Exchange, using a method based on the royalty relief mechanism that Brand Finance uses globally.  Brand Finance plc, the world’s leading brand valuation consultancy, advises strongly branded organisations on maximising their brand value through effective management of their brands and intangible assets.  Founded in 1996, Brand Finance has performed thousands of branded business, brand and intangible asset valuations worth trillions of dollars. Its clients include international brand owners, tax authorities, intellectual property lawyers and investment banks. 

Brand Finance is headquartered in London and has a network of international offices including Colombo.