from Hacker News

Only 6 of the 50 largest companies are in Europe. LVMH is highest at #18

by golfer on 6/14/21, 8:26 PM with 90 comments

• by tormeh on 6/14/21, 9:50 PM

  Economist ran an article on this: https://www.economist.com/briefing/2021/06/05/once-a-corpora...

  We're in the service economy now, and Europe has no real single market for services, due to all kinds of national regulations that differ throughout the block. Nor does it have well-developed financial and labor markets, partly also because they are currently partitioned by nationality. Its stock exchanges are too many and too small, etc. The list goes on.

  For many big European companies, an astounding percentage of revenue comes from the US or China. But if you start a startup building for US/China from the start, why would you want the HQ to be somewhere in Europe?

  Edit: This also means that the story is very very different for products that can be shipped in boxes. Europe does extremely well in cars, beverages, clothing, chemicals and that sort of thing. Also electrical utilities. No idea why, tbh.

• by noizejoy on 6/14/21, 10:06 PM

  That bigger is always better seems to be a concept culturally possibly most valued in the US.

  But what if the “bigger is always better” mantra is actually wrong? (Many fallen empires come to mind.)

  Maybe it’s an overall healthier state of affairs to have less concentration of power?

  So maybe Europe is just fine?

• by jeffreyrogers on 6/14/21, 9:38 PM

  Since this is done by market cap it leaves out a lot of private companies (which don't have a market cap by definition). Probably wouldn't change the status of Europe too much (although Glencore would be on the list if private companies were included).

• by Calvin02 on 6/14/21, 9:46 PM

  From scanning the list it seems like none of the 6 were started in the last 15+ years. That should be alarming to EU policy makers.

  As this divide grows, I worry that Europe may resort to protection mechanisms as a way to shield local companies and give them a chance to "grow".

  The future is more protectionism and less free trade. And that's not good for anyone.

• by umeshunni on 6/14/21, 9:40 PM

  EU is about 15% of global GDP (and rapidly declining), so perhaps this isn’t that out of line (~12% of top 50).

• by jeffrallen on 6/14/21, 9:58 PM

  I'm pretty sure that all of the employees of the small specialized privately owned companies in Switzerland and Germany really appreciate the lack of giant companies, which historically use their power to erode worker's rights.

• by break_the_bank on 6/14/21, 10:12 PM

  This reminds me of what Peter Thiel wrote about Europe in Zero to One. Europe was in the indefinite pessimism block, the world is going to crap and they don’t think they can do nothing about it.

  Here’s the larger paragraph from Zero to One.

  > Indefinite Pessimism Every culture has a myth of decline from some golden age, and almost all peoples throughout history have been pessimists. Even today pessimism still dominates huge parts of the world. An indefinite pessimist looks out onto a bleak future, but he has no idea what to do about it. This describes Europe since the early 1970s, when the continent succumbed to undirected bureaucratic drift. Today the whole Eurozone is in slow-motion crisis, and nobody is in charge. The European Central Bank doesn’t stand for anything but improvisation: the U.S. Treasury prints “In God We Trust” on the dollar; the ECB might as well print “Kick the Can Down the Road” on the euro. Europeans just react to events as they happen and hope things don’t get worse. The indefinite pessimist can’t know whether the inevitable decline will be fast or slow, catastrophic or gradual. All he can do is wait for it to happen, so he might as well eat, drink, and be merry in the meantime: hence Europe’s famous vacation mania.

• by hbbio on 6/14/21, 10:12 PM

  France has 4 companies in the top 100. All of them in the luxury fashion/beauty products: LVMH, L'Oreal, Hermes and Dior.

  Three of them were created before WW1 (that's a one) and Dior in 1946. And all of them thrive because of the lifestyle image associated to the "France" brand since then.

• by aidenn0 on 6/14/21, 9:47 PM

  More evidence that there is more competition in Europe?

• by reader_mode on 6/14/21, 9:41 PM

  Am I the only one horrified looking at those graphs explode in the last couple of years ?

• by riccardomc on 6/14/21, 10:19 PM

  We will probably look back at this time as the golden age of information technology. Monopolistic phenomena are emerging everywhere. Things are going to change[1].

  There's no real way to demonstrate that a few larger players are better than many smaller ones.

  Maybe is good for economies of scale, but mainly for the big fishes and only marginally for end users.

  [1]https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/did-big-tech-get-too...

• by acchow on 6/14/21, 9:35 PM

  And I count 13 for the SF Bay Area.

  This concentration of wealth generation is astounding.

• by Shadonototro on 6/15/21, 12:24 AM

  and 20 of the 100 largest ones, wich is not that bad

  we all know why USA has most of them, their hegemony plays a big role

  what's interesting is the GDP of EU was bigger than the US one in 2007, after 2008 it started to stagnate

  https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?location...

  that's interesting..

• by ubanholzer on 6/14/21, 10:39 PM

  It's not always a benefit to have the biggest companies in the country. EU has a lot of stable SMEs, which helps the middle class to stay strong, thus creates a stable and safe environment for the people. In the US, there are about 50% of the workforce in SME, in the EU there are more than 66%. It's better and healthier to diversify.

• by yread on 6/14/21, 10:25 PM

  Oh no Europe doesn't have enough too big to fail corporation that could lobby for more corporation-friendly policies

• by pm90 on 6/14/21, 10:04 PM

  The EU has a larger population and land mass than the US. The EU has similar universities, mature financial systems and a common cultural heritage (Western Civ) with the US. Why is the EU not an economic and military superpower?

• by TMWNN on 6/14/21, 11:38 PM

  Harry Truman said in 1945 about the atomic bomb, "We thank God that it has come to us, instead of to our enemies". I feel the same way about FAANG and Silicon Valley as a whole (and Wall Street, and Hollywood, and SpaceX/Tesla, and the Ivy League), that they are in the United States.

  That doesn't mean I approve of everything they do. That doesn't mean I can't or won't decry their putting thumbs on scales toward a certain type of bien-pensant ideology. That does mean that, overall, I am very, very glad that they are American instead of Russian, Chinese, or even British, French, or German.

• by tormeh on 6/14/21, 10:22 PM

  Why does Boeing have a higher market cap than Airbus? That seems nuts to me...

• by ortusdux on 6/14/21, 10:02 PM

  We used to make steel! -David Mitchell

• by varjag on 6/14/21, 9:54 PM

  The USA had a few trillion freshly flushed into the economy, the EU (yet) had not.

• by tibbydudeza on 6/14/21, 10:03 PM

  Amazed @ Adobe - they maybe have 5 software products in their portfolio.

• by ralph84 on 6/14/21, 10:12 PM

  400 years of brain drain will do that

• by amedvednikov on 6/14/21, 9:59 PM

  High taxes and bureaucracy everywhere in Europe.

• by adamnemecek on 6/14/21, 9:35 PM

  Idk if that’s something to celebrate.