The value of brand rankings is undergoing a structural reassessment. The 2026 China's 500 Most Valuable Brands report, released on June 24, shows that the total value of listed brands reached 45.29 trillion yuan, up 7.76% year-on-year. The entry threshold exceeded 5 billion yuan for the first time, reaching 5.089 billion yuan. More notably, the number of hundred-billion-yuan brands expanded to 146, indicating a continuous increase in the concentration of value among top brands.
Textile and Apparel Sector: Over 30 Brands Listed, Hundred-Billion-Yuan Club Takes Shape
The textile and apparel industry performed strongly in this year's ranking, with over 30 brands making the list, placing it among the top five industries by number of listed brands. Eight brands—Erdos, Hengli, Weiqiao, Bosideng, Jinba, Qipai, Anta, and Yueda—joined the hundred-billion-yuan club, forming the core of the industry's brand value. In terms of category distribution, the list covered the entire industrial chain, from raw material manufacturing and garment production to sportswear and home textiles, demonstrating the breadth and depth of the industry's branding process.
This data sends a clear signal: the textile and apparel industry is no longer reliant on the low-cost OEM label. The listed brands include chemical fiber giants like Hengli, Rongsheng Petrochemical, and Tongkun; sportswear brands like Anta, Li-Ning, and 361°; and garment brands like Bosideng, HLA, and Peacebird. All segments of the industrial chain are accelerating their branding efforts, which means the profit distribution logic of the entire industry is being restructured—brand premium is replacing processing fees as the core of value.
AI Influence: A New Dimension of Brand Competition
The biggest variable in this year's ranking lies in the update of the evaluation system. For the first time, the World Brand Lab incorporated an AI influence index into its framework. This adjustment directly addresses the challenges brand management faces in the digital intelligence era. A high AI influence indicates that a brand has greater say and visibility in the AI ecosystem, enabling it to overcome the barriers of traditional search engines and gain an advantage in a context where consumer decision-making paths are shortened by AI.
Professor Xu Jing of Peking University's Guanghua School of Management made a key point: in the digital intelligence era, a brand is no longer a static knowledge structure in consumers' minds, but a complex system jointly maintained by consumers, platforms, algorithms, content, communities, and organizational capabilities. The core question brand management needs to answer has shifted from "how to enhance brand equity" to "how brands can continue to serve as intermediaries of trust, meaning, and emotion under new technological and social conditions."
For textile and apparel brands, this change means that brand building cannot stop at traditional advertising and channel deployment. In AI-dominated search and recommendation scenarios, brands need to proactively build the ability to engage with algorithms—from optimizing the structured data of product descriptions, to designing brand content to be AI-friendly, to establishing technical visibility in vertical fields.
Industry Impact: From OEM Base to Brand Matrix
The trends reflected in the ranking data are highly consistent with the transformation paths of textile and apparel industry clusters. Traditional fabric clusters like Shengze and Keqiao are undergoing a shift from "selling fabric" to "selling brands." The inclusion of upstream chemical fiber companies like Hengli and Rongsheng Petrochemical means that raw material suppliers are beginning to value brand building, which will change downstream procurement logic in the medium to long term—branded raw material suppliers are more likely to command premiums and secure long-term orders.
For garment and sportswear brands, the emergence of a hundred-billion-yuan club signals increasing industry concentration. Brands like Anta and Bosideng have achieved value leaps through multi-brand strategies and global expansion, while smaller brands face greater competitive pressure. With AI influence becoming a new evaluation dimension, the Matthew effect among brands is likely to become more pronounced—top brands have the resources to build AI ecosystem influence, while smaller brands need to find differentiated entry paths.