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Asos, Zalando, Flixbus, Klarna, Xing, Spotify, Auto1, Takeaway.com

I'm not from Europe or America and the only one I've heard of is 'spotify'.

Are you really denying that the EU is well behind the US in terms of software though? I mean that's immediately obvious to any casual observer. Not sure why people are so defensive about it.

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European IT industry is certainly behind in terms of scale and penetration of global markets (the reasons are explained here in other comments, including fragmentation of the EU market and harder access to VC money), but I don't think it is behind in software engineering (especially considering numerous offices of American giants and EU aquisitions like Skype) and European companies can easily dominate on the local markets. All mentioned companies are quite successful and visible in EU (e.g. check the revenue of Zalando). And of course there are many other, classic software companies like SAP, TomTom, HERE etc.

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