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Apple's reputation is tanking with patriotic Chinese consumers thanks to Trump's trade war

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Apple CEO Tim Cook.
Richard Drew/AP

  • Apple has tumbled in a ranking of China's top brands put together by the US consultancy Prophet.
  • The firm found that Chinese consumers were becoming increasingly patriotic when it came to the brands they chose to use, and experts say this is due to the US-China trade war and President Donald Trump's ban on the Chinese tech giant Huawei.
  • Apple slipped to 24th place in Prophet's rankings in 2019 compared with 11th in 2018. At the same time, Huawei crept up the rankings to second place from fourth.
  • Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
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Apple has tumbled in an annual ranking of China's top brands.

The brand consultancy Prophet surveyed 13,500 Chinese consumers for its latest brand-relevance index, released Wednesday, and asked which brands were most indispensable to respondents' lives.

The survey found that Chinese consumers were increasingly patriotic when it came to which brands they chose to use.

In this year's ranking, Apple slipped to 24th place after being 11th in 2018. At the same time, the Chinese tech giant Huawei crept up the ranking to second place from fourth.

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Huawei has suffered extensively from the US-China trade war.

The firm is blacklisted from doing business with any US firms, its phones are locked out of the US market, and its latest flagships won't run with Google's services because Google is an American company. The US is also pressuring its allies to keep Huawei from supplying infrastructure for their 5G phone networks over fears the firm could spy on behalf of the Chinese government, a charge it denies. Huawei blasted the US government earlier this month, accusing it of "trying to disrupt Huawei's operations with every tool at its disposal."

Read more: Apple already has a China problem. Here's why it could get worse.

Apple is also likely to suffer from the trade war. Products like the iPhone, AirPods, and the Apple Watch will become more expensive because of President Donald Trump's tariffs on Chinese goods. The bulk of these products are manufactured in China.

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'Chinese consumers interpreted what happened to Huawei as an attack'

Jay Milliken, a senior partner in Hong Kong at Prophet, told Bloomberg that Chinese consumers were becoming more "nationalistic" in their shopping habits and in the brands they used.

"There's a lot of nationalistic buying in that category because Chinese consumers interpreted what happened to Huawei as an attack," he told Bloomberg.

The US-China trade war and Trump's ban on Huawei are encouraging these consumers to opt for alternatives to US-made products. And some experts say this wave of nationalism will stretch beyond the trade war.

"It's not temporary," Melissa Guzy, a managing partner at Arbor Ventures, recently told Business Insider's Troy Wolverton. "It's a long-term shift that's happening." She continued: "I think most Chinese don't believe they need the US for anything."

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