Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by jamiequint | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

jamiequint

This general attitude is why Europe has barely produced any great new companies in decades.

View on HN

Disagree with that statement but I get the sentiment.

Look at Asia and how many new companies they produced despite overworking themselves to death.

The problem with Europe is not mainly this but that we truly do not have a common market.

We cant pool resources and talents into one place and launch a pan-european project. Europe is still countries actively engaging in competition among themselves.

HSBC, Airbus, Deutsche Telekom, AXA, Shell, Nestle, Barclays, Metro, L'Oreal, BP, Michelin, AstraZeneca, Air France, Christian Dior, Philips, Anheuser-Busch, Vodafone, Lufthansa, Volkswagen, Siemens, Allianz, Bosch, Unilever, Maersk, Renault, Saint-Gobain, Bayer, Nokia, Ericsson, BT Group, Accenture, Madrigal Elektromotoren GmbH

You do realize that by including companies from the 19th and early 20th century, you're agreeing with him?

They are all older then a decade (some more then 100 years), he's not wrong that europe has massive problems making "big new company's", however the conclusion that it has something todo with the ~absence of exploitation is probably wrong ;)

Europes business landscape is distinctively different. In Europe you have many small global champions (mostly specialized in something that only they can produce well) and only few Mega-Corporations compared to US or Asia.

I think this is a better diversification than concentrating all GDP into a few big player.

"but europe didn't make facebook!"

> Madrigal Elektromotoren GmbH

Wait, isn't this a fictitious company from breaking bad?

Yeah I thought someone would get this (the only fake company on here).

Accenture came out of American firm Arthur Andersen which went bankrupt because of its involvement with Enron. It was incorporated in Bermuda, then moved to Ireland about 10 years later.

How many of those were founded in the last few decades?

Also, not really sure how state sponsored airlines and telecoms are a great counterargument to Europe's failure to innovate.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com