I think you picked the cutoff (70) so that the numbers look worse than they are. If you look at the top 100 it’s 16 (EU) vs 4 (Switzerland).

16 is still not good enough. That being said none of the 4 companies from Switzerland are in software and hardware. ABB is maybe the closest (data center electricity).

Also Switzerland is a very very rich country. Neutral.

Also other countries like Germany has a lot of small companies that are world leaders in their field. That’s part of Germanys resilience.

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cccbbbaaa 36 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Judging by rank is a bad metric anyway. Why should ST, Infineon, NXP, Arm (UK, not EU), Airbus, Safran, etc. be considered irrelevant because they are not in the top 70 or 100?

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niklasrde 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The EU accounts for 14% of global GDP, so accounting for 16% of top 100 in market cap isn't terrible (if we're weighing each in the top 100 equally).

	▲	eloisant an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		and 5% of the population so still not too bad
	▲	hn_throwaway_99 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		It's not like those are independent variables though. The idea is that if Europe were more competitive and did a better job fostering innovation then both its percentage of global GDP and top companies by market cap would be higher.

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lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> I think you picked the cutoff (70) so that the numbers look worse than they are.

Reminds me of a point I heard about sports statistics. If a given team is reported as having "won 4 out of their last 7 matches", there are good odds that they also won 4 out of their last 8 matches. Also pretty good odds that their seventh-last match was a win, otherwise the stat would be 4 out of 6. (It could also go the reverse direction if the goal is to make it look worse than it is.)