Apple brand falls in China ranking

The trade war is taking its toll on Apple Inc., a new survey of Chinese consumer attitudes shows.

The company tumbled to No. 24 in an annual report on China’s top brands, falling from No. 11 a year ago. In 2017, before the trade war started, Apple was fifth in this ranking. Meanwhile, Apple’s biggest local rival, Huawei Technologies Co., climbed two spots to No. 2, behind only Chinese payment service Alipay.

The shuffle in the rankings is a sign of the growing challenge U.S. brands face in the second year of President Trump’s tariff showdown with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping. The survey findings show Chinese consumers growing cooler toward some American brands, especially after smartphone giant Huawei saw its chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, arrested in Canada last year at the behest of the U.S. government.

Trump followed with a ban on Huawei products, which helped fuel a surge of local support for the Shenzhen brand, said Jay Milliken, senior partner in Hong Kong with Prophet, the San Francisco consulting firm that conducted the survey of 13,500 Chinese consumers.

Prophet’s survey, conducted annually, this year asked Chinese consumers in large cities for their views on more than 250 brands across 27 categories. Respondents evaluated brands they used or were considering using, rating their relevance to the lives of consumers based on qualities such as innovation, usefulness and dependability.

“There’s a lot of nationalistic buying in that category, because Chinese consumers interpreted what happened to Huawei as an attack,” he said.

There were only two U.S. names in the top 10 this year — Android at No. 3 and Intel at No. 9 — down from five in the 2017 survey.