Where are Europe’s tech giants?
“WTF? Surely that can’t be right.”
That was my reaction when I first saw the chart, and I bet you thought the same.
We all know the US is home to the big tech names: Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Meta. No surprises there.
And no one will be shocked to learn that the US economy is bigger than Europe’s. In 2023, the numbers looked like this:
- United States: $25.44 trillion
- European Union: $16.75 trillion
That’s a 52 percent gap in nominal GDP. Big, but not outrageous. The real shock comes when you look at what each economy has produced in terms of new companies.
Specifically, from-scratch public companies started in the last 50 years with a market cap over $10 billion.
But that doesn’t come close to explaining what the chart shows.
When it comes to that criteria, the US doesn’t just outperform Europe: it's no comparison at all.
Even if you ignore the tech giants, the US list is long and varied. Logistics, finance, pharma, consumer, media. Hundreds of serious businesses built within a generation.
And as for Europe? Fourteen (14).
That’s the total number of companies in the EU that meet the threshold of being founded from scratch, not by merger, takeover or spinout.
Here’s the list, with market caps from November 2024:
Spotify - $93.3 billion (Sweden, 2006)
DSV - $48.8 billion (Denmark, 1976)
Adyen - $45.7 billion (Netherlands, 2006)
Argenx - $36.5 billion (Belgium, 2008)
EQT AB - $33.6 billion (Sweden, 1994)
Amadeus - $30.2 billion (Spain, 1987)
BioNTech - $28.4 billion (Germany, 2008)
Hexagon AB - $26.5 billion (Sweden, 1975)
Ryanair - $21.0 billion (Ireland, 1984)
Evolution AB - $18.7 billion (Sweden, 2006)
ICON - $17.5 billion (Ireland, 1990)
Pandora - $11.8 billion (Denmark, 1982)
Delivery Hero - $11.5 billion (Germany, 2011)
AB Sagax - $10.0 billion (Sweden, 1995)
I’d heard of about five or six of them. The rest were new to me.
Nearly half the list is made up of companies from Sweden or Denmark. Ireland and Germany show up twice. Spain makes the cut once. Southern Europe is barely represented.
The stat that inspired this chart came from Mario Draghi’s report into European competitiveness. It’s a blunt one:
“There is no EU company with a market capitalisation over EUR 100 billion that has been set up from scratch in the last fifty years, while all six US companies with a valuation above EUR 1 trillion have been created in this period.”
That’s the sentence that Andrew McAfee picked up on. He and his team dug through the data to visualise what that gap really looks like, resulting in this chart and more, originally published here.
They used Draghi’s definition of a from-scratch company: not created through mergers, acquisitions, or corporate spin-offs. And they only included public companies, not private valuations. Which is why a company like Celonis, despite being valued at $13 billion, doesn’t appear.
The 14 companies listed above have a combined market cap of around $430 billion. On one hand, that’s a lot. On the other, it’s less than half the value of Tesla. It’s one-eighth of Apple.
The gap isn’t just in scale. It’s in surface area. The US has produced more large companies, in more industries, with more upside still ahead. Europe hasn’t.
So what’s going on?
You’ll hear plenty of theories. The US is a single market with one language and consistent regulation. Europe isn’t. There’s more risk capital in America. There’s more ambition. More tolerance of failure.
All probably true, to some extent.
But language isn’t the main problem. German, French, Spanish, Italian, and English are spoken by tens of millions of Europeans. Language doesn’t stop Netflix or TikTok. It shouldn’t stop new companies either.
The real problem is structural.
Draghi again: “Innovative companies that want to scale up in Europe are hindered at every stage by inconsistent and restrictive regulations.”
Inconsistent is bad. Restrictive is worse. Europe isn’t just fragmentedm, it’s cautious. And while caution is fine in some areas, it kills startups.
The US has created not just giants, but ecosystems. Europe hasn’t.
Of course, this isn’t just a European problem. It’s a global one. The world needs more centres of innovation, not fewer.
If everything is built in California, the rest of us become dependent, both economically and strategically.
We need more successful companies being built all over the world. Not just in America.