Which successful companies came out of EU in the last 20 years? How well do they stack up against US (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Uber etc) or China (Tencent, Alibaba etc)? If not many, does that mean EU entrepreneurs are hindered by the regulations?
One might also argue that European model is better because it might prevent one company from dominating the market. But if that is the case, why does EU face technology dominance from American companies (smartphones, search, e-commerce, operating systems etc), rather than having that marketshare captured by European companies?
I think the deviating factor there is actually mindset. E.g. Germany and Japan have dominance over U.S. car manufacturers. Most companies in the E.U. don't set out to break the world and change it; they aim for a quality product built after a series of increments. In the U.S. every company in technology is out there to change the world, even if they are selling something totally common. Namely, the iphone was a combination of existing technology combined so as to change the world. In the meantime other companies were innovating in the RF area, which well makes sense, but doesn't make for a "ground-breaking" product.
That argument has been made and argued by a number of economists -- will try to find some citations if I get the time -- feel free to google scholar in the meantime.
I understand the fear of regulation that exists, however we need to take a step back from time to time and evaluate the options. Right now, U.S. has really shitty internet (I am serious, price/value is really bad...), because the 3-4 companies, crash smaller ones or bully them into suicidal terms; and have shared the U.S. pie among them. (I bet in your area only 1 carrier has acceptable speeds -- given you have more than one.) The companies were paid though to improve the infrastructure and people chose to effectively let them roam free. They pocketed the cash.
The US has approximately 100 tech companies worth $10 billion or more. Europe, with over 2x the population of the US, has about two dozen.
Seimens is a very old - 170 years old - industrial conglomerate. That's like using GE, Berkshire Hathaway or 3M as an example.
Nokia is barely a good example. They're a $30b market cap company, Google can sneeze and lose or gain that in a day. Texas Instruments and Broadcom are worth 3x what Nokia is; Cisco is worth 7x Nokia. In a land of giants, Nokia is pretty small.
SAP is a very serious tech company, and by far the only good big tech example Europe has today. They're slow growth, have a $140b market cap, with $4b in profit (equal to about a month of Apple's profit). They're less than half the size of Oracle and will be eclipsed in size by Salesforce in the near future.
ARM was one of the more exciting European opportunities, until Softbank ate them. NXP might be able to make some good growth moves now that they're apparently not ending up in the belly of a US giant. I could see them forging a good path as an independent.
Spotify might have a bright future. They have to make a decision soon about whether they're going to be culturally an acquiring and aggressive growth company, or whether they're going to watch that extreme valuation (which they can probably never justify given the margin situation) disappear and get acquired in the next market downturn. If they play their cards right, they could be a legitimate long-term $30b-$50b market cap media/tech company (legitimate as in actually backing that up with earnings).
I think Europe's big opportunity, broadly speaking, is in artificial intelligence over the next decade plus. That's a solid inflection point where some new big companies will emerge. Europe has tons of AI talent to make something happen there (if they don't all sell out to big US or Chinese tech).
> I think Europe's big opportunity, broadly speaking, is in artificial intelligence over the next decade plus. That's a solid inflection point where some new big companies will emerge. Europe has tons of AI talent to make something happen there (if they don't all sell out to big US or Chinese tech).
I can only see this happening if the the US doesn't continue sucking up the best talent in the field, which is unfortunately very often the case over the last 20 years. Europe is pretty un-competitive in terms of remuneration, especially for those at the leading edge of AI work. Many European markets need to wake up and start treating their software engineering grads better, today it too often feels like they get lumped with 'the IT guys' rather than seen as a creative instrument for new business ideas. How you fix this culture I have no idea though.
I actually think a more difficult immigration environment in the USA could be a potential factor in improving Europe's fortunes, if it stems the leak of smart people leaving. The recent change in posture over things like the H1-B visa, the likely rescinding of the right to work on an H4 dependent visa especially (this would prevent a huge number of immigrant spouses from being able to work if their partner moves to the US - this makes a job in the USA a much harder sell for married couples), could have a pretty big chilling effect.
I'm not sure this works all that great as a rebuttal, given Facebook alone just lost more value in a single day this week than the combined 2017 revenues of those three...
Also, Nokia and Siemens were founded in the 1800s, they did not emerge in "the last 20 years". SAP dates to the 1970s as well.
It pains me to admit as a European, but the lack of any real large modern internet success stories to emerge from our continent is a real shame.
Nokia is an independent Finnish company. Mobile phones under the label "Nokia" are made by HMD Global, also a Finnish company, which bought some of the remnants of Microsofts smartphone branch, which had previously bought Nokia's smartphone branch.
One might also argue that European model is better because it might prevent one company from dominating the market. But if that is the case, why does EU face technology dominance from American companies (smartphones, search, e-commerce, operating systems etc), rather than having that marketshare captured by European companies?