If that is what you got from the available materials and the track record of the EU DPAs to date then you should probably do some more reading.
EU companies have as much or more stake in being compliant than the few US tech giants active on EU soil.
I see the impact of the GDPR on EU based companies every week and it is definitely moving the needle towards more secure operations and a much better attitude towards stewardship of data-subject related data.
I don't claim to be an expert, but this random site claims that British companies have suffers 10k data breaches [0]. According to this, there have only been 91 fines. I don't see how someone can come to the conclusion that this is actually helping data be more secure.
> I don't see how someone can come to the conclusion that this is actually helping data be more secure.
The fines are not what has made things getting more secure, the work done to avoid the fines is.
Before the GDPR pretty much every company I looked at had absolutely terrible security, since the GDPR is in effect most companies at least stopped seeing security as a cost to be avoided, with an associated increase in awareness at the rest of the company and better processes and controls to ensure that data does not leave the servers when it isn't intended that way.
It's 91 fines so far, and a whole pile of warnings and interventions, give it a few years and the cumulative effect will be substantial.
Oh, and that 10K number is only the breaches that the companies are aware of and that have been reported, the real number is likely to be much higher. And without the GDPR it would be much higher still.
But there are few major EU tech companies in the first place. These kinds of rules are going to hurt foreign companies because they're the major players in the market.
I'm European and I barely use anything made by European tech companies in terms of final products. I'm sure there are some networking chips or similar in some of the devices I use, but the major software and hardware I use is made and designed outside of the EU.
Now I would argue that the reason we don't have many major tech companies in the EU is because of a hostile environment for them here. I really can't think of many other reasons. The EU has more people than the US that are about as educated. There's at least a comparable amount of capital around, our internet connectivity is actually better, but we have very few major tech companies, even fewer ones that focus on internet stuff.
Why is this important? Because if eventually we want to build automation to do other jobs then we need a lot if qualified tech workers.
That’s three software companies, (Booking, SAP and Spotify) one of which I mentioned, one of which is a wholly owned subsidiary of an American company. I concede on Spotify, though it is worth one tenth of SAP.
I regret I was unclear, using tech instead of software. The top five most valuable companies in the world are all US software companies. The only European software company on that list is SAP. Oracle, Netflix and Salesforce also make the cut. SAP is worth 15% of Apple, 25% of Facebook, just barely less than Netflix. Alibaba and Tencent are in the global top ten.
China has big tech companies like the US does. Europe does not.
China and the US have a huge single language market. The EU has a single market with tons of languages. It's much harder for a British or German startup to spread EU wide equivalent to how a US startup can achieve reach across the US and Canada. The EU single market only partially mitigates the problem. Single language seems to count much more than a single jurisdiction.
The usual pattern is when someone in the EU gets interesting, they get bought by a larger US outfit. I don't think China yet allows full foreign takeovers, or a selection of their majors might now be US owned or shuttered too. The other standout in your list, Samsung, is a typical huge conglomerate - TVs, monitors, phones, cameras, memory, storage etc, and part of the larger conglomerate with fingers in everything from fridges to ship building.
ARM is not in the top 100 firms worldwide by market capitalisation though it is obviously a very impressive achievement. Also, if you’re going to count ARM Cisco, Intel and NVIDIA should all count too and they are in the top 100 firms worldwide by market capitalisation.
I’m sure there are many, many reasons the EU only has one software company to compare with the US or China’s behemoths but the fact remains that it does only have one. There are 16 European companies (including Swiss) in the world top 100, minimum, so I don’t see any special reason Europe couldn’t have software companies that are a really big deal outside SAP but compared to the US they don’t.
As to standouts Toyota is also an enormous conglomerate though you need to expand the list to get to 32. Taiwan Semiconductor is pretty impressive, worth more than Toyota and no one knows it exists.
EU companies have as much or more stake in being compliant than the few US tech giants active on EU soil.
I see the impact of the GDPR on EU based companies every week and it is definitely moving the needle towards more secure operations and a much better attitude towards stewardship of data-subject related data.