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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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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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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).
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and 5% of the population so still not too bad
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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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> 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.)

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> Well I'm european and...

Yea sure. You sound like a typical Russian bot.

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  > And let's not forget: there were promises made to Russia to never grow the EU to the east. Then the EU started exciting Russia by saying they'd incorporate Ukraine into the EU: I'm not against that but doing that did trigger a war.
Simply not true. The EU is a democratically elected body and nobody can give any promises what their successors will or will not do, because that will be decided by the electorate and not by any current official.

Not to mention that the initiative for joining the EU has always been on the side of new members, against the opposition of many existing members who fear displacement and disruption to their positions inside the union. All the narratives about how the West has been "encroaching" upon Russia depend on denying the obvious fact that the initiative has come from Eastern European capitals, not Brussels or Washington.

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You are proud of tax evasion? Would be fun to restrict market access for Swiss companies …
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No hardware besides ASML? Nonsense.
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I feel like this posts says more about yourself than about the EU.
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Bro there's more to life than software and hardware. Try to get outside today :)
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Those are the aspects most relevant to HN, though.
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