EU problem is that all that investments in past 30 years in Eastern EU. didnot create self sustaining entities that can help Western EU.
Eastern EU despite very high education standards could not replicate Asian tiger economies.
Now Western EU is aging population, buried in Debt, non-existant military power and all of sudden it has to compete for natural resources in open market. on top of that Europe want to create semiconductor supply chain and Europe digital sovereignty. (aka software development).
Europe does not have 4 million Indians that can write trillions of line of code in single language. They are truly living in lala land of shortages and stagflation. I even think China will become only option for Europeans to drive around in Cars. what will VW and BMW do without China?.
Europe simply cannot compete with US anti-competitive actions. The little tech industry Europe has had is systematically dismantled by US corporations which have more capital. Large European investors typically balk at investing in the tech industry and prefer to invest in things like real estate which are a lot safer. When small startups do show up, they almost inevitably either get gobbled up by foreign US capital or foreign capital investments into alternatives which render them useless. There are loads of examples of this. MySQL being bought by Oracle, Skype being bought by Microsoft, Nokia being infiltrated and destroyed by Microsoft, etc.
You can even see this in strategic sectors like nuclear power where US used lawfare to make Alstom sell out to GE and added a poison pill to Westinghouse which caused Toshiba to go bankrupt. The European tech sector lacks the capital to resist and EU governments are too weak to defend the sector to begin with. The whole NordStream II case and the Iran sanctions are good examples of EU government weakness.
Also, a lot of the companies you see which have success in the US stock market, like social apps, have issues scaling in Europe because of the language barrier. You need to make a multi-lingual website to begin with and that increases startup costs. This means you get a lot of small companies which seldom or never can scale to global ambitions. Which is why Europe has had more success in the tools and backend applications where the language problem is minimized. It is not like Europe has no competitors to Amazon and the like, it is just that they are small and localized to each market.
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