I am Dutch, so naturally I checked the top 3 for the Netherlands. Number 3 (Booking.com) and number 1 (Marktplaats.nl, the dutch craigslist), I can understand because they are indeed big and well-known sites.<p>However, the number 2, apparently, is a website called "Shapeways", which is supposedly worth $175M. I have never heard of it and I asked some of my colleagues and they never heard of it either. After visiting shapeways I found that it is a 3D printing community site.
After some research I found that it is actually founded in the USA, and just happens to have an office in the Netherlands.
World Startup Report team here. It's awesome to see our data on HN!<p>One interesting point to note is that out of the top 7 countries, none of them are from Europe. To put into context, the biggest internet company in Europe is merely 1/40th of the size of Google.<p>HOWEVER, Europe dominates the unicorn club (companies over $1b in valuation). Nearly half of 30 countries on the unicorn club list are European.<p>This prompts the question, is European market big enough but fragmented in such way that you can easily build mini-billion dollar companies, but never anything truly massive?<p>We'd love to hear everyone's thoughts on this.<p>Also, AndriusWSR (lead researcher behind this research) will be joining us shortly to answer a few questions. Please feel free to ask away.
Hilariously inaccurate because of the focus on "Internet companies", a vague term at best.<p>Apple is missing at a market cap today of $578 billion, and whilst a lot of that is down to hardware, they have an internet office suite, the largest number of online registered users with credit cards on their DB in the World and probably shift more data than Facebook just in app downloads.<p>BT Group is missing from the UK despite a market cap of £30 billion. Without them, there is no UK Internet. They were developing hypertext systems in the 1980s.<p>Others have pointed out mistakes elsewhere in the data for other countries - I sense that without context, this data is mostly useless and uncitable.
Britain's biggest three are ASOS (online clothing retailer), JustEat (online takeaway ordering) and Wonga (online short term loans at ludicrous interest rates). A sad state of affairs for a technologically advanced country.<p>Finland's top three are all Free To Play gaming companies. That's interesting. Is there some sort of tax incentive for gaming companies there?
I am shocked that The Economist, a publication I respected in the past, would use a single source without performing further fact-checking.<p>For example, migme is headquartered in Singapore (and listed on the Australian stock exchange), so it's surprising that they're featured under Indonesia. There are probably more discrepancies to this chart that should be corrected.
General observation: Log scale!<p>Observations regarding Germany: Rocket Internet (#1) specializes in copying foreign companies, like creating the "Zappos" clone "Zalando", which is #2.
The data seems pretty inconsistent, for example Skype is included but Supercell isn't (both acquired). Also attribution to country isn't consistent. Sometimes the founding country is used and sometimes the current HQ location is used.
Dear All -<p>World Startup Report team here. There have been many repeated questions in this thread, so we compiled all them into a single long answer for everyone.<p>At World Startup Report, our goal was to show the world how big of an internet company you can build in each country. We have partnered with Startup Genome, as well as worked closely with Startup Digest and Hackers/Founders network to collect all this data.<p>As we proceeded, we lowered our goal of covering 100 countries to covering 50 since we aimed to find the most reliable (as well as interesting) data. Our methodology included looking at publicly available data (stock market), online publications from sources like Financial Times, TechCrunch, The Next Web, etc. or sometimes even personal conversations with those companies. The definition of internet companies was: no ISPs, no software development houses (unless they have online products they are selling), no hardware companies. If a company is diversified (as was usually the case) we looked at the revenue breakdown and searched for the highest internet-related revenue streams.<p>However, we do accept the fact that this information is constantly changing (we had to replace a few companies due to various reasons (even bankruptcy) over the course of our month-long research). At the same time, we are aware that there could have been a few omissions and this is the price we are willing to pay to show the public the best available data there is on the web right now.<p>One last thing, we've put up our raw data on Silk, so you could play around with it as it is easier to visualize it.<p><a href="http://internet-hall-of-fame.silk.co/explore/table/collection/companies/column/country/column/industry/column/value/order/asc/country" rel="nofollow">http://internet-hall-of-fame.silk.co/explore/table/collectio...</a><p>If you'd like to help us make it better, or contribute with information about your country, please contact us at hello@worldstartupreport.com<p>-- The World Startup Report Team
The graph is misleading. South Africa Naspers owns Allegro (1st Poland). Secondly, Allegro, which is polish Ebay, has almost whole market share in Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus etc. and possibly that contributes to Naspers value.<p>There is no nk.pl (polish facebook, 50% market share). It was sold for 200m a few years ago.<p>Hard to compare valuation of private and public companies, especially in different places. Better graph would with revenue, profit, growth.
For sweden I wonder why not Betsson is included? Its market cap is almost double that of Klarna, the current 3rd company? PaddyPower (another online betting company) is included for Ireland.<p>It might be more missing, but this was easy to spot since Im both swedish and very familiar with Betsson.
The source is here, with the raw data linked at the bottom of the page.<p><a href="http://www.worldstartupwiki.org/page/Internet_Hall_Of_Fame" rel="nofollow">http://www.worldstartupwiki.org/page/Internet_Hall_Of_Fame</a><p>Also answers the question I had about how they figured out the valuation of non-public companies.<p>> Valuation data comes from: stock market data (highest point in the history of the company was selected), acquisition value, valuation at the latest round of investment, or, as a last resort, a guesstimate based on revenues and industry.
Only 4 countries from Africa are listed , South Africa , Kenya , Algeria and Ethiopia , I don't know how they acquired such data , but I can assume the data is not accurate about the companies listed from Algeria (companies I know).
Also some big African market are not listed : Egypt, Morocco, Nigeria.
Or is it that the internet companies of these countries are many small companies that compete and do not monopolizing the market?
I was surprised to see Chile and Peru so far below Argentina. All the news pieces that I see make Argentina sound like a communist dystopia.<p>Anyone know whether the Startup Chile program (where foreign startups basically get a cash handout to physically relocate to Chile) is likely to have an impact on this chart?
What factors are needed for a country to have start-up success. We know SV comes from defence money, but setting that outlier aside, what's the winning formula?<p>China's success would suggest that a huge talent pool and protectionism towards the big US internet companies is a winning move. Anything else?
For the people missing one or two of the top three for each country, they are underneath one of the others because their data points very close with similar valuations (Facebook and Amazon in US).<p>Use the nifty filter buttons at the top of the graph to see first, second and third companies separately.
Somehow, Nigeria didn't make the list.<p><a href="http://arstechnica.com/security/2010/01/victims-lost-93-billion-to-419-scammers-in-2009/" rel="nofollow">http://arstechnica.com/security/2010/01/victims-lost-93-bill...</a>
Side note - I was surprised by the number of trackers that ghostery showed on the economist's site! <a href="http://imgur.com/LftipWr" rel="nofollow">http://imgur.com/LftipWr</a>
Shapeways is 2nd in the Netherlands, ahead of Booking.com. I have to say I'm quite surprised; I knew 3D printing was taking off but I didn't know it was that popular.
I don't know whether to depressed for Canada or not given some of the other countries relative performance. I didn't expect Argentina to be so close though.
I am glad The Economist did the datab visualization in log scale. Otherwise, US and China would be so dominant rest of the countries would be impossible to see.<p>Very cool data indeed.
what the hell is a internet company, I could not find a explanation?<p>For example, in denmark the largest company in their chart is unity. Thats a gaming framework company, not really a internet company.