Startup nations: The biggest internet companies

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Startup nations

Even Luddites know that the largest internet firms are in America. Yet the forthcoming public offering of Alibaba, an e-commerce giant, underscores that China is catching up fast. As for the rest of the world, of 50 countries examined in the World Startup Report, 30 have at least one internet company whose value has at one time surpassed billion. South Africa’s elevated rank is a nice surprise—though Naspers, a media company, is an outlier. India, despite its size and a giant IT industry, has only produced modest-sized web firms. Israel (labelled the “Start-Up Nation” in a 2009 book) and Singapore punch above their weight. Many others punch below theirs. America’s Amazon and Facebook, ranked second and third, would be the biggest in any country save for China. Google is bigger than the peak value of the top internet firms in all other 48 countries combined. Worryingly for Europe, of the top five countries, none is European.

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