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.
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.
I am not Dutch, and have limited knowledge of startups, but Shapeways is very well-known. They were one of the first to capitalize on 3d printing boom, so obviously they have high valuation. The fact that it's bigger than booking.com is surprising, but it's not surprising at all that it is in top 3.
Xero was making big waves as a new accounting software and had millions of overseas investment poured into it. TradeMe is our version of eBay which was basically the first widely-used site in New Zealand.
However number 2, "Diligent Boardbooks" which listed on our stock exchange in 2007, however started in 2000. They seem to sell "Board Portal" software which allows boardmembers to "securely store and access documents" as well as do video conferencing etc.
The Netherlands have an interesting situation. Even though everyone would say the startup ecosystem is booming, the country has not managed to produce BIG success stories. We selected Shapeways as one of the top 3 companies there. They've raised almost $50M to date (http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/shapeways) and we put our guesstimate in a range of $150M - $200M. The company is actually founded by Dutch founders and they do have quite a big number of their employees in the Netherlands (close to 50 but should double-check on this one).
With that in mind, it'd be interesting to hear what would you put as the 2nd (or 3rd) most valuable Dutch internet company? Thanks!
I'd like to name these companies off the top of my head:
bol.com: originally started in Germany, but head office is in the Netherlands. They are the "dutch" Amazon, with 405 million euros in sales in 2012 [0], the same year it was also sold to Ahold for a reported 350 million.
coolblue: Dutch online electronics store, like newegg. They launched specialized webshops for just about every category of consumer electronics. They did 248 million euros in sales in 2013 [1]. All three founders made it into the top 10 of wealthiest self-made dutch entrepreneurs below the age of 40 [2].
Takeaway.com: takeaway websites, best know for the dutch and belgian websites "thuisbezorgd.nl" and "thuisbezorgd.be", which have a market share of 90% and 70% in their respective countries. They received a 74 million euro ($103 mln) round B this year [3].
Similarly for Israel, would CheckPoint really count as an Internet company in the sense you use here considering their product revenue breakdown? If so in USA, you may as well consider many network infrastructure companies there, Or some cellular data companies may be considered within this list.
I would guess that maybe Layar or WeTranser have higher valuations. Blendle must be the fastest well-known grower, with a very exportable concept but I doubt they have a very high valuation right now.
The country location for a company in this research was determined by where the bulk of the employees are currently. The intent of this definition is to show which countries are most capable of building big internet companies, not where the founders are coming from.
Yahoo!Japan is actually an independent company from Yahoo. It is roughly 30% owned by Softbank and 30% owned by Yahoo. It is listed as it is the top 3 internet company in Japan.
Yahoo is not listed, because it is not the top 3 company in the US.
Afaik Shapeways was founded in the Netherlands as a Philips spinout. They later moved to the US, I assume for a better investment climate but that's just a guess. Could be that they somehow re-founded the company there legally and then made the Dutch office a subsidiary.
World Startup Report team here. It's awesome to see our data on HN!
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.
HOWEVER, Europe dominates the unicorn club (companies over $1b in valuation). Nearly half of 30 countries on the unicorn club list are European.
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?
We'd love to hear everyone's thoughts on this.
Also, AndriusWSR (lead researcher behind this research) will be joining us shortly to answer a few questions. Please feel free to ask away.
-The whole common internal market thing is taking it's time.
-While it's much easier than elsewhere to live and work in another country it's still a hassle and there's lingual and cultural issues in the way as well.
-Crucially, the jungle telegraph usually ends at borders. News of great startups or whatever don't really spread well because of language issues and the fact that people tend not to have cross-border social relationships. There are programs like Erasmus that try to alleviate the issue, but not everyone goes on exchange, especially asocial types and the Brits.
It seems important in a report such as this to distinguish between place of control vs. operation.
As a South African who wants to leave for better opportunities overseas, it was a bit odd to see South Africa as 3rd on the list given my personal experience. I've been presented with opportunities at both the 1st and 3rd largest South African companies on that list and rejected them for what appeared to be better opportunities elsewhere. Seeing them here had me second-guessing myself.
Looking closely, it's clear Naspers is the reason for South Africa's position. Yet only 54% of their revenue comes from Internet-based business -- nearly all of which represents foreign-based acquisitions [1].
What is the objective of the report? As you point out, Europe dominates the 'unicorn club', and being closer to whatever magic makes that possible seems more appealing to me as a person seeking business opportunities, but this conclusion is not obvious from the presentation of the data.
Is it desirable to be an environment that focuses on being absolutely massive rather than just huge? Lots of smaller companies might imply better competition (or companies being bought up before they get even bigger...)
Very surprising you couldn't take the time to ensure that markers are not directly obscuring other markers. Right now in my browser the US has exactly two items shown as do many others due to this obvious flaw.
So in summary it seems many are saying the data is flawed and the presentation is clearly flawed.
Perhaps it was a little premature to expose this to the world?
Please note, we stopped updating this list since January 2014 because the list got too long. If anyone wants to lead this community effort moving forward, we'd love to speak to you!
The World Startup Report team aimed for 100 countries for this research, but we settled for 50 as we didn't have enough local support from the smaller countries.
If your country is not on the list, and you would like to join us for the next World Startup Report research as a representative for your country, please email us: hello@worldstartupreport.com
We'd love for your help to participate in this community research!
1) We found 39 companies belong to what we call the “Unicorn Club”
(by our definition, U.S.-based software companies started since
2003 and valued at over $1 billion by public or private market
investors). That’s about .07 percent of venture-backed consumer
and enterprise software startups.
2) On average, four unicorns were born per year in the past
decade, with Facebook being the breakout “super-unicorn”
(worth >$100 billion). In each recent decade, 1-3 super
unicorns have been born.
Hilariously inaccurate because of the focus on "Internet companies", a vague term at best.
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.
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.
Others have pointed out mistakes elsewhere in the data for other countries - I sense that without context, this data is mostly useless and uncitable.
They probably tried to focus on companies that began as internet companies. Microsoft and Apple most certainly did not. Google, Facebook, and Amazon most certainly did.
Naspers is not an Internet company, and didn't start as one. Listing Naspers is equivalent to listing Time Warner, Disney, Reuters, or Bloomberg. It's silly at best.
I'd say they filled in weak data points when it was convenient.
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.
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?
The British list would appear to have some omissions. E.g. online real-estate site Rightmove (LON:RMV - has market cap $3.76Bn) is bigger than JustEat and Wonga.
Adam, thanks so much for the information. Indeed, our World Startup Report was not aware of this company. We will update our data (can't promise that the Economist will change their infographic though). Thanks again!
- ASOS is the Amazon of clothing, shipping internationally. I think it's the number on online clothing retailer in Australia.
- As much as we all hate Wonga, in terms of technology they we're the first fully automated loans company.
- Just Eat (exactly the same as Seemless for the UK) is also an amazing accomplishment for a company/website, uniting thousands of takeaways. (That's what we can to-go restaurants in the UK).
I'm fairly proud we have some huge ($15 billion dollar) home-grown companies in these areas (even if Wonga is evil).
I am shocked that The Economist, a publication I respected in the past, would use a single source without performing further fact-checking.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There is no nk.pl (polish facebook, 50% market share). It was sold for 200m a few years ago.
Hard to compare valuation of private and public companies, especially in different places. Better graph would with revenue, profit, growth.
Lukas, World Startup Report team here. We worked together with the Economist putting this together.
We did look at private/public AND also acquired companies (in case of Allegro).
Would you have a source for the acquisition information? Keep in mind that we looked at 3 companies per country in which case it could have only been coincidence. Our goal was to show the relative extent of what is possible in different countries rather than to provide an exact estimate of each company.
Initially, we were aiming at covering 100 countries. However, due to lack of data from some countries we cut it down to 50.
We are working with our global community of contributors and we are looking for people who are willing to help us. If interested, just send us an email: hello@worldstartupreport.com
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.
It might be more missing, but this was easy to spot since Im both swedish and very familiar with Betsson.
Also answers the question I had about how they figured out the valuation of non-public companies.
> 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.
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?
Argentina is indeed a strange case, a capitalist society coexisting with a socialist trending communist government.
In practice, most companies manage to navigate ("hack" :) ) the increasingly ludicrous government impositions, and most know (or hope) many will be lifted once the government changes hand (or another crisis explodes, which doesn't seem far off).
Some do quit, it was interesting to read about the entrepreneurs behind Wash.io having started a company in Argentina before, and quitting because it was so much work for so little benefit:
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?
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).
Use the nifty filter buttons at the top of the graph to see first, second and third companies separately.
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.
"Roll over the interactive chart above to see the company and value. If all three datapoints are not visible, it is because one is shrouded by another (ie, America's Amazon obscures Facebook, since both are worth around $185 billion); clicking on the key at the top will remove datapoints."
As mentioned in another thread, The World Startup Report team aimed for 100 countries for this research, but realistically we were able to only get good data for 50 countries for this research.
If your country is not on the list, and you would like to join us for the next World Startup Report research as a representative for your country, please email us: hello@worldstartupreport.com
We'd love for your help to participate in this community research!
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.