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Comment by manquer | Hacker News Reader

OP is EU has become an open air museum and all the good companies are now either American or Chinese.

> Boeing makes the comparison easy for Airbus.

What else to compare against this claim ?

Airbus is by no means perfect of course, but it is still miles ahead of the best the Americans or the Chinese have to offer in a very complex large scale industry. It is not just aerospace, even auto is still über competitive, European manufactures are on par or perhaps better than anything Ford and GM have to offer. I am sure Europeans can come with good examples for every bad one.

The point it is easy to paint a narrative however reality is lot more complex and doesn't match with sweeping generalization .

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Tech companies are getting insanely large valuations (I work in tech, and I think they're absurd). Europe doesn't have many large public tech companies, therefore Europe looks bad in terms of the "industries of the future"

Plus a bunch of angry USians really irritated by the anti-trust stuff the EU has been doing (DMA etc).

It's not even all tech either. Europe has some big players in silicon or biotech for example. It does however lack giants that introduced major disruptions in the way things are done, like cloud services, social networks, gig economy etc.

Not sure why this comment was downvoted / dead? ASML and Bayer come to mind.

IMHO, Airbus is a good counterexample of how EU could do things better.

It's not perfect, but it's competitive and successful. Lots of countries contributed to its success, leaving (most) political issues aside.

> Airbus is by no means perfect of course, but it is still miles ahead of the best the Americans or the Chinese have to offer in a very complex large scale industry

First of all this is an empty statement that reeks of rhetoric. You don’t have the full grasp of the picture to quantify if a company is miles ahead of the competition. Nobody does. Ahead in terms of what? Even if we want to compare companies in more specific aspects (for the sake of comparison) — be it revenue, vision, innovation, supply chain, or efficiency — Airbus is not ahead of the pack (which includes the likes of Lockheed Martin, GE Aerospace, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Rolls Royce).

Airbus is half of the commercial airline market duopoly with Boeing. Customers really have no other choices. Airbus benefits when Boeing drops the ball. Simple as that.

> Ahead in terms of what?

Passenger safety for starters, passing safety audits, units shipped or sold, not having a 60 year old airframe to iterate its product with [1].

> Airbus benefits when Boeing drops the ball.

It also has to build airplanes of quality, price and on time that can fly economically for its customers. Duopoly doesn’t mean it has to do nothing.

[1] MCAS was needed after all because Boeing decided to stick a big new engine on a low sitting 1960s 737 airframe, instead of developing a new airframe.

Again, this is what you said:

> Airbus is by no means perfect of course, but it is still miles ahead of the best the Americans or the Chinese have to offer in a very complex large scale industry

So now you don’t claim Airbus is “miles ahead” of the best that US and China can offer, moving the goal post from that very generic statement to just comparing A32X with B737MAX?

So why not comparing 787 vs. A350, or C130 vs. A400, or Sikorsky vs Airbus helicopters? They’re comparable products that Airbus offer vs the competition. Did you know that 787 has got 1,900 sales and 1.300 deliveries, whereas A350 has 1,300 sales and 650 deliveries in the same time frame?

> It also has to build airplanes of quality, price and on time that can fly economically for its customers.

Did I say it doesn’t? Still, customers don’t have a choice. Boeing has been doing badly, yet the backlog of 737MAX is still more than 4.700 units and growing. No meaningful cancellation despite its problems.

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