Apple Inc. remains number one in Forbes' World's Most Valuable Brand list of 2013.

For three consecutive times, Apple remained number one in the Forbes' list. For 2013, Apple was worth $103.4 billion - this is 20 per cent higher than 2012.

"It is worth nearly twice as much as any other brand on the planet by our count," Forbes said.

Apple had sold a record of 33.8 million iPhones as announced in its fourth quarter report. It had successfully sold 14.1 million iPads, 4.6 million Macs; 30 billion songs through iTunes. Although iPod sales decrease because people now use their phones to listen to music, Apple was still able to sell 3.5 million iPods for its fourth quarter - a total of 26.4 million for 2013.

Apple had maintained the top spot for its great products according to Kevin Lane Keller, branding expert and professor at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business.

What sets Apple products apart is its crafty design.

"Design is how a product works, how it looks, how it feels. It's functional and aesthetic. Apple has embraced that in the fullest sense possible in terms of making products simple, but also good looking and attractive," as explained by Mr Keller.

At number nine is Apple's strictest competitor, Samsung Group. Although far behind from Apple, Samsung had the most solid one-year gain amongst all the brands ranked by Forbes. The company is now valued at 29.5 billion - 53 per cent up from 2012. Samsung had also grown year per year achieving a 136 per cent growth over the past three years.

The primary contributor to Samsung's remarkable growth is its sales of the Samsung Galaxy S4 smartphone and the company's memory chips. According to IDC, Samsung's smartphone shipments gained 40 per cent - 81.2 million - during its third quarter. In fact, Forbes noted that Samsung's marketshare was even larger than the combined marketshare of the next four brands in the list.

Forbes also noted that Samsung had spent money wisely for its marketing strategy - $4.4 billion in 2012 advertising budget - particularly in sports. South Korean based Samsung Electronics had been sponsoring the Olympics since 1988. As part of its marketing, Samsung entered a $24 million a year jersey sponsorship for the European soccer team Chelsea.

"Really strong brands are highly innovative and highly relevant, so they are always moving forward in the right direction with products and services that really appeal to people and are distinctive and different," explained Mr Keller.

Samsung and Apple had been up each others' neck and the competition had been effective as these two companies continue to grow its value.

However, Forbes warned that the value of a brand can quickly "collapse in the complex, fast moving technology world" as what happened with Nokia and Blackberry.

In 2010, Nokia was valued at $27.3 billion which was ninth highest in the world. At present, Nokia was only worth $7 billion and was ranked at number 71. The same goes for Blackberry which had been left behind in the smartphone race.

Forbes' World's Most Valuable Brand list requires brands to have a strong presence in the U.S. In order to make it on the list, "Forbes valued the brands on three years of earnings and allocated a percentage of those earnings based on the role brands play in each industry (e.g., high for luxury goods, low for airlines). We applied the average price-to-earnings multiple over the past three years to these earnings to arrive at the final brand value (click here for the full methodology)."

The brands included in the list should also have a strong presence across 15 countries and 20 broad industry categories. U.S. based brands took half of the list. There were nine brands from Germany, France and Japan.

Tech brands dominated the Forbes list.

The top ten Most Valuable Brands are:

1. Apple

2. Microsoft

3. Coca-Cola

4. IBM

5. Google

6. McDonald's

7. General Electric

8. Intel

9. Samsung

10. Louis Vuitton

Full list of Forbes World's Most Valuable Brand.