Why European Businesses Kinda Suck.

To pre-empt upset Europeans. I'm a proud advocate of European businesses. I regularly bore my friends by telling them about the issues with the European economy, and how we ought to support European businesses when possible. When making purchasing products, the nationality of the company is almost always a factor in my decision making. That being said, just compared to the powerhouses of America... European business do kinda suck - Jack

One important aspect missing from this, is that unlike the EU, the USA does not use a value-added-tax (VAT). This means that if one buisness sells a product to another buissness, and then that buissness sells to another buisness and then finally to the consumer, then sales tax is paid at every step of that chain in the USA. This creates a strong incentive for vertical integration, because if you own all those intermediate companies, then you bypass the intermediate sales taxes and have a competitive advantage. In the EU with the VAT, if your business buys something and then re-sell it or integrate it into a component that you sell, you can reclaim the VAT you originally paid on that product as a tax credit or payout. This makes it actually very practical to have many small, independent businesses to create value chains where each buisness specializes on a very specific product, rather than vertically integrating into a mega-corp that owns its whole supply chain. So only comparing the large businesses between the EU and the USA can give a very skewed picture. __________________ Also, I think the point about the unity of the US market is sometimes oversold. Every US state, and sometimes even every county or municipality in that state can have different tax regulations, reporting requirements, consumer rights, environmental regulations, etc for companies doing business there. Very similar to the EU but a bit less extreme

Those pesky worker's rights, data protection laws and anti-monopoly rules really take the fun out of business, am I right?

EU: - give us a finished product that's already selling - a 5 year financial plan - a 30% stake in your company - pass all regulations before you come to us = and we give you ~€1 million US: - write a good plan - find people - build a prototype - give us 5-10% stake = and we give you ~$10 million Why would anyone choose option 1?

I’m surprised Airbus , BP Petroleum, VW and ALDI didn’t make the European Lists

@3:59, Using Europe interchangeably with the EU is very misleading. Europe has 50 countries, and the EU has 27. Also, Japan has around 125 million in population, but it does not stop many manuals and products coming with Japanese instruction on them.

The landscape of big tech is dominated by American companies, and there are a few key reasons why. Firstly, the US fosters a culture that thrives on risk-taking and innovation. This is fueled by a constant flow of venture capital, which is essentially investment money specifically for startups. This allows even small, ambitious tech companies to get the funding they need to grow quickly. In Europe, the culture tends to be more cautious, and the investment landscape is more fragmented, making it harder for young companies to secure the resources they need to compete on a global scale. Secondly, the US boasts a massive, unified domestic market. This allows tech companies to develop their product or service for a large audience right off the bat. Imagine a playground - a big tech company can refine its concept on a vast American "playground" before taking it international. In Europe, things are more like a collection of smaller playgrounds, each with its own language, regulations, and consumer preferences. This makes it more challenging for European tech companies to scale up to the level of their American counterparts. Finally, the regulatory environment in the US is generally more favorable to tech companies. While Europe enforces stricter regulations on data privacy and competition, which are important for consumers, they can also stifle innovation and growth for young startups. Think of it like training wheels on a bike. While they help you learn, they can also hold you back from reaching your full speed. The looser regulations in the US allow American tech companies to experiment and grow rapidly, although this advantage can come with downsides that require ongoing scrutiny.

In fairness, the Silicon Valley mentality also tends to cause quite a lot of economic chaos. For example by "Blitz-Scaling" new business models like Uber and AirBnB, bankrupting all the traditional competition, and then jacking up the prices again. So maybe Europe is better off without that.

Are mega corps a good thing for society?

Also businesses in Europe have to pay taxes at a higher rate than US companies, and in the US we are a consumer nation....

Bruh I’m Dutch and I didn’t know that Marktplaats was owned by eBay…

You work for 40yrs to have $1m in your retirement, Meanwhile some people are putting just $10k in a meme coin for just few months and now they are multi millionaires. I pray that anyone who reads this will be successful in life

Facebook is a really bad example. They swept through Europe like it's nothing. So, you can build a product that is markable in all countries. That's not really the issue. For the language barrier: Go for English first. You still also have access to the US market from the EU.

This video was about 20 seconds of actual content plus 8 minutes of padding

If you do a sector wise comparison, European companies are competitive. Pharma, aircraft, fab equipment and so on. The difference is in the software sector, which is also the most profitable sector by far today.

O my god who would guess that not being able to form cartels, buy competitors, and ripp off customer would lead to not being able to grow big

Europe and the EU generally are pretty bad to get a business started in. Even if you have an amazing idea you have to start small, and being small is just un-affordable given the tax systems in the EU/UK etc.

I'm favoured, $27K every week! I can now give back to the locals in my community and also support God works and the church. God bless American .

Two observations, as an American who has spent many years in Europe: 1) Europeans commonly hold the idea that America is one big homogenous culture/market. This is not true. At. All. While it is true that the U.S. market is more integrated than the European market, it still possess and must cater to wildly different cultures. This is particularly notable between large cities (NYC, Washington, Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Austin, etc.) and rural areas; indeed, that's probably the single largest driver of our current political polarization. Even beyond that division, however, different regions are very distinct. As someone who has moved from Washington, D.C. to Chicago to, most recently, Atlanta, I assure you that those three cities are very different. The market reflect that. As a concrete example, I'd never even heard of a Publix or Krogers before moving to Atlanta. Here, they are the dominant supermarkets. 2) In my opinion, the European market remains far more fragmented than it needs to be. The fact that companies need to set up a separate headquarters in each individual European state, with different logistics, different management, and different inventories, boggles my mind. That creates an entirely unnecessary layer of management, with all the inefficiencies which it implies. As a concrete example, there were many times when, while living in Barcelona, I couldn't find what I wanted on amazon.es, but lo and behold, amazon.fr or amazon.de had the item in stock. Could I order from them? Sure, but delivery cost three times as much and it would take four times as long to arrive. For a smaller European competitor, that's a huge barrier to overcome. European policy, it seems to me, remains focused on protecting the domestic industries of each individual state at the expense of encouraging a genuinely European market. Changing policy to encourage a continent-spanning market, with companies identifying as European rather than German or Spanish or Hungarian, might do a great deal to improve European productivity and boost European companies. I want European companies to compete on an even footing with American, Chinese, and (eventually) Indian ones. I want the E.U. to form a third pole of geopolitics. The first step in that process will be to stop thinking of business and politics as German or French or Polish, and start thinking of it as European.

The US maximises growth at any possible extent. One example is immigration. The US has good future prospects which is why people invest, europe is full of declining population former communist nations that don’t speak the same language and don’t want to hurt their culture. Not a good place for growth. Investors don’t care about culture or the crime rate. They only care about if a number increases. The US doesn’t care about national identity, culture changing, demographic shift, etc. meaning that the US will grow. The more globalist you are the better.