Brand valuation can be a somewhat subjective measurement, but it can be broadly useful to ascertain what kind of asset

a particular company or products logo and other branding materials have become over time.

This valuation represents something like the goodwill and esteem and respect held by the

company in question, but it also implies a sort of standard of quality

or desirability to consumers. How much more can you charge for a beverage when you slap a Coca-Cola

logo on it? How much more likely is a consumer to grab the Coca-Cola bottle than that of a competitor.

How much credibility and prestige does a logo carry?

And how does that contribute to the long-term health of the company that informs that logo's meaning?

The multinational tech company, Alibaba, which was founded in China and which operates within a huge sprawl of different industries, has one of the most valuable brands on the planet.

Different groups do different brand valuations according to different formulas, but a cross-section of such analyses typically place Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft in the top three.

Google and Visa come in at fourth and fifth place, and Alibaba, followed by its also Chinese competitor,

Tencent, at sixth and seventh. Notably, Facebook, McDonald's, and MasterCard generally fill out the rest of

the top 10 with the aforementioned Coca-Cola, ranking 12th or 13th. That sixth-place brand,

Alibaba, is a beast of a company, founded in April of 1999 by the now world-famous entrepreneur, Jack Ma,

out of his apartment, Alibaba began its life as a B-2B, a business-to-business marketplace,

and received a $25 million investment from Goldman Sachs and SoftB, among others, later that same year, based on the

expectation that they intended to build the foundation of an e-commerce infrastructure in China, while

also helping Chinese businesses export their wares around the world. Two huge opportunities

that, if approached in the right way,

could make everyone involved very, very wealthy.

The company was profitable by 2002, and in 2003, they launched the online shopping site,

Taubau Marketplace, the online payment platform AliPay, the digital marketing platform,

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