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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Blame France, with its four most valuable companies being in the frivolity business: https://companiesmarketcap.com/european-union/largest-compan...

Don’t blame the Dutch (ASML), Swiss (Novo Nordisk), Germans (SAP), etc.

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Blame no one. The frivolity business means nothing. They are luxury companies making luxury goods at the corresponding very high level of quality and with the know how to market it properly. As they say, if it was easy, everyone would be doing it. For a community constantly bragging about its cleverness, HN can be surprisingly narrow minded and immature sometimes.

France has its fair share of large industrial companies by the way.

> Blame France, with its four most valuable companies being in the frivolity business

What? What about Airbus (not fully French of course), Stellantis, Renault, Faurecia, OVH, Scaleway, STMicro, Doctolib? Just because what markets valuate luxury goods the most doesn't invalidate the existence and innovation of other sectors.

You could add Dassault Systèmes, Schneider, Safran, Thalès, Dassault Aviation (best fighter plane in the world, sorry Lockheed Martin...), etc...

Novo Nordisk is Danish, not Swiss.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novo_Nordisk

Personally I'd rather work on "frivolity" than selling ads!

The frivolity business made India and China rich, emptied out the Roman Empire of its precious metals and kickstarted globalism.

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