Very happy to eventually see a dedicated European Union channel. Keep the good job. I wonder why the E.U lacks so much behind on media and communication

It's actually "Nokia", "Siemens", and "Ericsson" .. but ... those days are gone. And most of them nowadays focus more on selling technical-professional level products rather than consumer level products. So, us general publics don't hear much about them anymore in the news.

Especially in Germany (where i live) the people start to forget where our wealth comes from and that its still a competition to stay walthy. But unfortunately they will have the results in like 50 years and then its already too late.

This channel is golden. Thank you for making this videos. Hope it grows in subscribers

Most of Silicon Valley absorbs the talented Europeans in a braindrain fashion sadly...

The real problem is not that European countries have different languages and cultures- most tech workers know English- but that they have the same aversion to risk. If an entrepreneur goes bankrupt in the US or his company fails, he can try again if he can find more investors, and if the idea is good, previous failure rarely counts against him unless he was criminal and/or extremely negligent. In Europe, one bankruptcy or failure in business is like the mark of Cain on a businessman, and he'll likely be unable to get investment in any future projects of his ever again. Most European countries also make it hard to fire workers or to get them to work longer hours than usual, which are critical when a tech company has to scale up or down in response to a product launch.

This is so high quality, thank you for talking about this important topic!

A very well explained video, I never really noticed or knew that there were so few tech and innovative companies in Europe, but now I can't unsee it. Anyway well done

Very important topic, thank you!

At 0:43 you forgot to highlight Bosch, Adidas, ABB, FCA, and Novartis as being European in the top 50 most innovative list.

I think the main problem is the lack of entrepreneurial mentality. There's a lot of European engineers work in hi-tech companies run by Americans, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, even Indian, and Indonesian. Second is regulation, EU is tend to be more strict on regulation that will detain the development just because of "protecting the privacy" or anything. Having the small market isn't an excuses, South Korea with smaller population can have many innovative tech brands

I don't claim to be an expert on Europe or the EU, but from the bit I do know and what was touched on in this video it seems the EU's strict bureaucratic regulations and perhaps how difficult it is to create a business (especially one as expensive as a tech startup) may contribute as to why. No doubt there are very bright and intelligent people with ideas-- but if they are constrained in such a way, their only alternative is to relocate.

I work in software development and what I personally experienced is. 2 companies I worked for were bought and basically the tech and customer bases were absorbed and now they are no longer a EU company. In other scenario's 2 other companies i worked for had a lot of challenges to go to other countries in the EU. Mainly due to 1. Language 2. Culture 3. Infra simple example is the way Telephones and Postal codes work in other countries turned out to holding down these companies to easily move into other countries. Also due to local culture, the product worked in the Native country but the market of other EU countries was not yet mature/ready for such services at that point.

Damn, Europe is just upright disappointing at times. So much potential, so many options and ways to improve, but none of it is happening. Why? Because people are unwilling to overcome century old differences and grudges. It's sad really...

Never forget that keeping power decentralized has always been the advantage of europe, we have always had some of the smallest kingdoms, and our church nobel and merchant guilds were way more split up in europe than anywhere else in the world, decentralization is our strength

Macron speaking English feels weird

Keep up the good work! I havent understood Vestagers decision as well, but my sister who was working with companies, having monopoles like Google, was totally glad about Vestagers decision. I guess it is not like black and white, not even grey. But anyway it´s hard to see SpaceX and GAFA and have nothing in comparision.

Inovations don't come from big tech, they just buy all small companies with good Inovations and market it into monopoly. That's where big money comes into play. Europe is I believe home of biggest number of small to medium businesses that are motors of Inovations.

Very important topic.. there must have been thorough research behind it, big thanks for that!

Reading the comments shows why Europe is behind in technology compared to even smaller parts of the world, South Korea, Taiwan and etc. Seems like most people are in denial of the lack of established global European tech companies both hardware and software. You don't need to be a genius or invest hours of research to understand that most of the services and devices we use were developed/imported outside of the EU... In my opinion, this is because of the lack of European strategy to establish a union-wide innovation hub within the EU supporting the development of new technologies. EU has all the resources to do it and why it is not done is beyond me... Also, English must be established as the main business language regardless if it is situated in Ireland, Greece, Spain, Poland, Bulgaria or any other country so talent across the continent can be attracted and make it easy to work with international partners/workforce... It is not that difficult, just create an EU Innovation Board that focus on the development of a strategic EU city serving as a hub for the continent.

I always felt that Europe was lacking in this area but isn’t Spotify a big one?! It has truly changed how music is heard, profited, and shared. Surprised it wasn’t higher on the list.

I mean, for a while, Nokia had an extreme success, even though it was from the EU.

Edit: first and foremost, great video xD. Like you said Europe or even the EU isn't a single country, but a bunch of smaller countries combined. So honestly I never expected them to have big tech giants. However are all these things you called really a good representation of how innovative Europe is? For example: If I remember right the Netherlands is the second-largest agricultural exporter in the world, despite its size. If I remember right this is because they trade in genetically modified seeds. Sure this doesn't make them a tech giant, but does this not count as being a giant on an innovative level? I'm sure there are plenty more of these kinds of examples in Europe.

I'm really impressed by this video. Good animation and very well explained. Got yourself a new sub!

love the video and the fact you provided references, though not a single link works! Not blaming you, just surprised the websites moved/deleted their articles so quickly.

Network effects are a big reason that should be mentioned. People want to be where most other people are, hence winner takes it all and monopolies are created.

Great channel. I was tired of people from US and UK talking about EU. They don't understand shit about how we, as europeans, feel about certain things and problems. They only see things through their lenses.

While an interesting approach, there are certainly some things one can wonder about. For instance it's not really clear if patents are a good proxy for innovation, or instead are a way for big companies to keep out competition. Especially in the electronics and software market patents seem to be more the latter anti-innovation force, then pro-innovation. So there is a risk that this metric doesn't actually measure how innovative an area is and can at times even measure the opposite. In this light one can thus also wonder if the biggest companies are really such large engines of innovation, maybe they are, or maybe they're more self protectionist. Also, did Europe really de-industrialize so much? Actual industrial revenue went up, and the relative portion of the economy I thought hadn't changed that much for some time now. Certainly the number of jobs are way down, but that is a natural side effect of automation, meaning that people get shifted to the sectors that don't automate as easily. Lastly, I'm kind of wondering if the mid-sized companies are really that ineffective at innovation compared to big companies. For instance some argue that it's the German 'mittelstand' that is part of what makes it so effective in its areas of industrial production and innovation. With companies that focus a lot on getting just certain products right and not easily distracted from finding ways to further improve it, rather then some new venture. Still having said all that, it's true that at least in the past quite a few European innovators moved abroad to get improved opportunities. So it does seem like some things might need improving to help such people operate more easily in Europe. So while I wonder if all the points you brought up are really accurate, it might not actually change the conclusion.

Fascinating topic ! Especially given the conversation going on in the US on the power of thech giants and the way they (ab)use it.

This is just so well made and detailed, hats off to you!

Subscribed. This is the kind of channel is worth subscribing. Thank you

high quality stuff. where do you get your research from? or do you have guys on the team that are working in the field?

No 'big' companies means no innovation? And then you have to realize, GDP wise, the E.U. (and that's only 2/3's of Europe, because the U.K., Switzerland, Norway etc. make up the rest of it) market is much larger than the Chinese and only slightly behind that of the U.S. while its population is less than a third of China's and 4/3s of the U.S. So where does that productivity come from if we don't have big mega conglomerates that generate wads of $$$? It can't be only trade because trade goes stale very quickly if you have nothing to trade for. Colonialism is something we left behind almost a century ago, and nowadays is more of a China thing, so that can't be it either. Natural resources aren't a big thing in Europe anymore except for Norway and Russia, which both are not part of the numbers (non-E.U.). As you pointed out in the video, only 1% of the economy is agrarian so it's not like we export massive amounts of food to offset all other sources (actually, the country I come from does export massively innovative/expensive agrarian produce, out-exporting the U.S. while being less than a 20th of its size, but that's another story). And the gold standard has been abandoned a loooong time ago but the European currencies still hold their value. It's not like the E.U. is 'resting on its laurels'. That's an impossibility in a globalized economy, of which the E.U. is certainly part of. You can only take on debt so long before the debtors come knocking on your door (as some less fortunate E.U. nations recently found out). And producing nothing anyone wants and expect to import all goods you desire is a way to quickly send yourself to oblivion (I'm looking at you too, Brexit). So somehow all business activity and wealth generation in the E.U. has to be done in other ways than through 'big' 'innovative' companies. And probably its 'medium' and 'small' companies that do the job quite adequately. As you already said in the video, Europe (and now I'm explicitly excluding the U.K. here for obvious reasons) has a different take on what defines the free in free-market capitalism because Laissez-faire and the allowance of monopolies restrict freedoms of everyone else (and there are > 7 billion everyone elses in this world) and thus are anti-capitalistic (because they basically restrict everyone's freedom, including freedom of trade). There is no freedom without rules; only conflict and anarchy. That's something Europeans and European nations learned the hard way through one and a half millennium of conflict. I think the E.U. is just the right compromise between the possibility to express your own freedom and not restrict that of everyone else.

Either way I actually prefer the European status quo of not necessarily bigger companies but having more "smaller" (relatively speaking) firms. I mean if we didn't it'd likely lead to monopolising, and the companies having more influence in the politics than people, not to mention them being able to basically mess with customers due to them having beaten out any alternatives by sheer size. I mean we already see this in several sectors dominated by either one or a few large American companies!

ASML is one of the most innovative and important tech companies in the world, they are just very low key. :)

Your videos are top tier! I am amazed by the quality of your videos, keep it up!!!!

Let's hope with these issue getting traction to be solved, innovative companies will start to pop up and be able to compete on the world stage again. Due to how Europe is set up, things might bloom later, but hopefully in a more sustainable fashion. well

This channel is gold.

Excellent video. The most informative I've seen on this topic

I'm happy to discover your channel and hope to see more great content going forward. My only complaint would be that for a channel that claims to foster a common understanding on European matters, you took quite an American centric approach on this topic. Better title would be "Where are Europe's Tech Giants?", because there are plenty of European companies that inovate on a global scale - From Automotive, Pharmaceuticals, Electronics, Machinery that other countries use in their factories, High end Watches and Fashion... The better question would be, "Why Europeans don't want American/Chinese style Tech Giants?" and talk about union/family/co-op business we have at the moment.

What a great analysis!

This is beautiful just subbed

0:43 You left out Bosch, which is a German company and ABB which is Swedish.

At 0:44 Why Adidas was not underlined in yellow as a European company?

4:30 Patent applications are not a measure of being innovative. An arugment can be made that big companies innovate less. Fractured markets and inability to compete with US and chinese giants are probably the big reasons stopping innovation. Add to this the extensive regulations (which also vary between countries) which cause european enterpreneurs to go to the US.

I know all the comments say it, but how in the world does this only have

With this kind of problems in language why there no companies focus in instant translators machines.

Very well explained

I think it would be good to mention companies like ecosia or fairphone

One of the big reason why European tech startups hasn't lift off is because there's just not too much America meddling on its tech policies. Remember when Europe tried to tax American tech giants because of its profitable data mining out of European data and America responds with car sanctions?

I'm not a fan of using "Europe" as a shorthand for the European Union. There are quite some big countries missing (unfortunately).

great video

Tardy to the party, but new subscriber here; very informative and helpful from a European perspective. Thanks for your work!!

I liked this video. TechAlter did a good video on this subject, but from a different angle.

I'm divided on the subject tho, Innovations needs to be going faster in the EU definitely in data and tech, there also needs to be strong regulation against too large companies ruling over governments. I don't want to rely on companies to make 'good' decisions like in the US. As if companies are going to invest in the greater good. Too large Companies pollute heavily and avoid taxes, and build large corporate structure with no use outside of that. They even build the US in a way that you rely on other companies to do basic things, like get to your jobs (everything is car centric, everything is lobbied by and enviromental impact is ignored). And in China the people have too little freedon to move around by themself because everything is state owned or controlled. I like the quality of life I have now, and would love for there to be more innovation in useful fields, like data and quantum computing, AI, space exploration, construction, green tech, blockchain tech and more but this should not come at the expense of freedom or quality of life imo. Moreover, these 'tech' giants are really not the only bit of innovation we need in the decades ahead, we need green tech for better extraction of clean energy, we need ways to feed a growing world population as a whole, AI and data will help and innovation is a good thing but saving millions of peoples lives by providing efficient resources to more people will benefit in the long run. I don't see any company on that list doing that as if now. Also lots of companies nowadays still thrive on large scale government investment made 30-40 years ago with big government spending during the cold war in the US.

Great video! The EU definitely needs to harmonize the single market even more and remove the barriers you mentioned

Very good conclusions, for me the biggest deal is locked workforce potential because of high taxation and economic equality policies. You don't conquer the world with these.

0:45 You've not highlighted ABB(swiss company), Bosch(German), Addidas(german) and many other.

0:44 weird that you missed Adidas and Bosch there..

Great video

This channel will become big, mark my words.

Altough big companies can dominate and have big budgets for innovation, its actually better for the people to have small companies competing. This makes it so that companys have less power to have everything their way and effect the gouvernment. Also it gives you more alternatives to work at different places while big companies would give you no other choice to work there even if you are treated badly.

I think its mostly up to mentality. Start ups are generalry not as "sellable" as in USA and China because they are something which most of the time fails. Europe tends to invest into cementing its own proven industries rather than making new ones. That is why even tho European companies may not experience massive influx of revenue in a short time , they are far less prone to experience any failiures either. Its the slow and steady approach basically , like our houses , it takes much more time to build them than American ones , but once built they are here to stay for a very long time.

I think it rose up thanks to the nature of post-war rebuilding of the west centered around the US and the mismanagement present in the east block.

4:08 why is isle of man part of the eu om the map lol

Your innovation definition revolves around the internet ..

What is that tiny island east of Ireland at min. 04:00 and other similar sections? If it is the Isle of Man, well, it was not part of the EU even when the UK was 😀 (it has always had a special status, under the British Crown but not part of the UK, and never part of the EU)

Regarding your last comment - that we will never integrate as much as would be needed. Or desired. Maybe if we cant go deep - we can go wide! Around 2014 or 2015 (before Crimea) something big was brewing. Very big. There is a group of intrepreneuers, among others, who work for a single market from Lisabon to Vladivostok! Could you look into that in a future video? If you do so, could you please look into what is called the Heartland theory? Some English invention, but important. This will open up a Pandoras box of why and what to expect next, when looking at different countries foreing policy.

An interesting topic for sure, but there is the concern that the mergers will dominate local markets. It's a big threat to national sovereignty. How can we guarantee that the mergers will guarantee workers' conditions, the maintenance of local markets without being out competed and low prices for consumer goods if there aren't strong regulatory measures and restrictions? How can we guarantee that the countries of the lowest industrial output won't feel absolutely dominated? A threat to national sovereignty in the member states is a threat to the continuation of the Union itself. We're already seeing a pattern where southern Europe feels like it's being exploited by the bigger economic powerhouses of Northern and Central Europe. We already have cases of discrimination against Southern Europe made by high officials of the European union which in on itself doesn't help at all. Considering the rise of nationalist populism in Europe how can the further integration of markets be accompanied by the guarantee that the countries with weaker economies can grow too without feeling the fears of the loss of national sovereignty and tee centralisation of tee means of production to larger economic powerhouses in the European Union? How can making the European Union more competitive in the global market be a threat of the very continuation of the union itself?

He's a french right? Tu as un bien accent Sry for my bad french

This comment dates from when this channel had 12k subs. And 3 days ago it was on 6k. This is exploding!

I mean the links they don’t open!!

The common market helping to reach critical mass faster is an argument, but it's only a small part of the equation. Look at some of the biggest tech hubs in the world: Tokyo, Singapore, Tel Aviv, Zurich, Seoul... they don't seem in a rush to merge with their neighboring countries.

Can you make a video on how sustainable European social services are like healthcare and such when in a few decades much of their workforce will retire.

You forgot a big one in inovation !!! Its in the netherlands .. taiwan cant work without it It all starts in the netherlands .. Apple and microsoft (all tech) needs chips mostly from taiwan and taiwan needs it machines who come from the nl from the company “ASL” the nr 1 in chip manufacturing machines

UiPath a Romanian startup just jumped ship recently.

Basically protectionism is the culprit here. Anyway, Into Europe, you have just got a new subscriber.

Why do you refer to Volvo as a European company on this list? From my understanding it's to subsidiary of Geely, an innovative Chinese company (not European).

4:05 Those comments on China's tech companies mislead far away……If you have really checked those tech companies like Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, Xiaomi, Byte Dance etc in China, you'll find that they were mostly raised by foreign venture capitals, meanwhile most state capital backed tech companies work not fine in China.

Non of those pages were working bro What is wrong?

@Into Europe: I noticed that at 0:45, a list of companies is shown with European companies highlighted. The commentary states none are "Centered around the use of data". However, SAP is the largest digital back-end of many, many companies. From the SAP website: "SAP® customers include 80% of the Fortune 500 companies, 87% of the Forbes Global 2000 companies, and 98% of the 100 most valued brands.` Was this omitted because of ignorance on what SAP does or is there specific reasoning that SAP was left out? The difference between 1 company and 0 relatively large and hurts the overall argument.

ASML?

I don t think this would be such a problem if the research was done by the state, or if it would be counteracted by large investments into science.

Also I personally hate when commenters say what should be done at the end. This is my opinion but it doesn't matter what some journalist or video makers thinks. I mean no offense here, your videos seem good and I'm sure you're a good guy but even an academic who has said all the facts is only left with their opinions, it is far more valuable to say things that are true, your viewership is smart enough to make up their own opinions. This is another major gap in the already pauce analysis of european affairs. We don't have the likes of Nate Silver, Nate Cohn or Noah whatshisname, we tend to have ideologues who are driving an agenda.

As a tech person, regulation should be #1 on the list. And it is about to be much worse with DSA, DMA, DGA and the new AI proposal

From my understanding the EU brought it upon themselves with so much bureaucracy and regulations.

Maybe one day your Videos will translated in all european languages

Potatoe at 1:30, nice obscure dig in former Vice President Dan Quail.

What do all those billions do if they land in the pocket of 1%. I'd rather have slower development with more benifits for the less fortunate

Question: Why do we have to measure the success of a country (or a region in the case of Europe) by the amount of large companies? That is not what Europe is. We should value our craftmanship over standardized mass production; our scattered economic landscape over the concentration of wealth in few big cities; the strength of our small businesses (that in many European countries are the main source of the GDP) which are able to work together creating strong nets of cross-collaboration and cross-dependence (see the example of the Italian industrial districts); our labor rights that the previous generations gained after years contractual agreements and and discussion (sometimes harsh ones) over workers' exploitation (China) and extreme work ethics which leads to stress in the work-life balance (ask a random US citizen for details); our welfare States that grant us incomparable services over an overregulated and ultra-privatized economy. Just to name a few. We should make all these aspects our competitive advantage and try to leverage on that, instead of trying to mimic what those 2 players (China and US) are doing, with the result of falling in their trap (see the bad results brought by the single currency, strongly supported by the US, the luckily failed attempt of the US-oriented TTIP treaty, etc.). It does not matter if we will not reach the big numbers of those 2 countries, that is not our target because it's not on that that the success of a country (or area) is based on, especially in our case.

love to see more unicorns in the Eu tho

Always important to remind people that the EU isn't, unlike the US or China, a country : wanting to compare them for everything is pointless. Really good videos, I've began to think of launching such a channel for the past few months, now it feels like you cut the grass under my feet 😂 must admit I would never do that great

Brittian was the home of the industrial Revolution not the EU

I think language barriers have a lot to do with it. Europeans study English and most go to the US

What about ASML??

I have a question! What if a bright young European has a great idea for, let's say, a better search engine or social media platform. Would they have to jump through legal hurdles in order to develop this?

Interesting

After consuming adequate amount of data through books, videos and podcasts I can surely summerise, in upcoming decades, China is going to be new America and India the next Europe of our earth. There is many things to consider but just one point / view to illustrate 👉India and EU : multilingual and multi ethnic US and China : infragmented(Unified ) by language, peoples 's minds (estimated) towards governance

for the algorithm

I would just like to say: having giant tech companies is not an automatic goal we should aspire towards. Our SMB culture on the other hand is something we should be proud of.