FUTURE FORECAST REPORT Breaking new ground, the Products of Change Future Forecast Report tracks the brand, licensing, products and retail industry’s sustainable development and evolution. Published as a separate publication for BLE, here the significant findings are shared once again. The global brand licensing sector is a high-value industry driven by the emotional attachment consumers have with the brands they love. While you can’t put a price on emotional investment, you can certainly gauge the value of consumer spend within the brand licensing consumer products sector. And let us tell you, it’s vast. According to Licensing International’s 2024 industry report, the global brand licensing sector is now valued at $356.5bn, the lion’s share of which can be attributed to the industry’s Top Ten Global Brand Owners alone. In the summer of 2024, the Global Licensing Group released its Global Top 100 Licensors Report, putting that value of consumer investment firmly on paper. The value of the Top Ten Global Brand Owners – a table comprising The Walt Disney Company (at number one); Authentic Brands Group; Dotdash Meredith; Warner Bros. Discovery (at number four); Hasbro; The Pokémon Company; and others – rings in at a not insignificant $192.3bn. That’s just over half the entire value of the global brand licensing industry combined.
That’s a lot of money. It is also a lot of products. And where there’s a lot of products, there’s ultimately a vast environmental impact to consider, too. In a calculation of the very latest available data published by the companies currently reporting, taken from figures published in their most recent ESG reports, the total greenhouse gas emissions – by metric tonnage – of the Top Ten Global Brand Owners (combining scope 1, 2, and collected scope 3 data) is 28,692,993. An anecdotal calculation only, this figure comes with a list of caveats as long as your arm. First, this is data collected only from those companies within the Top Ten found to actually be reporting on their GHG emissions (note that four of the leading brand owners by value are currently not publicly reporting their GHGs at all); of those that are reporting, not all brand owners are calculating or including their Scope 3 emissions; and finally, those that are calculating their emissions – particularly Scope 3 – are doing so using a variety of methods rather than one universal, industry standard.
28,692,993 40 PRODUCTS OF CHANGE I AUTUMN 2024
metric tonnage of greenhouse gas emissions of the Top Ten Global Brand Owners