14 DAY TRIAL // The break is over, after two years away from the number one spot (which was temporarily filled by Google), Apple is again the brand with the most global impact. This was established after the most important ad executives, or at least 2,000 of them, have voted the computer outfit Apple as the most influential company in the world.
The survey was conducted by online magazine Brandchannel, and not all results were exactly obvious from the beginning. Who would have thought of the Arab TV station Al-Jazeera to be one of the top five most influential companies on the globe? It is located in Qatar and is offering an alternative to BBC or CNN. The Al Jazeera network has over 35 million viewers (overwhelmingly Muslim) and 30 bureaus worldwide, and considering the growing interest related to the Middle East and Islamic issues, its popularity grew significantly all over the world.
The winner for this year's poll wasn't much of a surprise though, Apple reported a net profit of US$ 295 million in the last quarter of 2004 alone and a 2004 overall net income growth of 300 percent. Nicely done, Steve! iPod owners are now at 10 million and don't think that's about to stop now that the Shuffle is out on the loose, and iMac sales tripled as Apple's overall computer sales rose by 26 percent over 2003 sales.
Google, world's number one search engine, had to settle for second this year as far as image goes. It doesn't have any reason to be ashamed of, it conducts more than 200 million searches a day and leads the world for search engine usage with 57 percent of the current market, followed by Yahoo at 21 percent and MSN at just 9 percent.