Every country in the world looks enviously toward Silicon Valley. And every country tries to have its own—whether it’s a silicon alley, wadi, shire, beach, hill, or swamp. Yet the hub of technology businesses on the West Coast of the United States remains outsize by any standard.
Our friends over at the Economist published this chart (paywall) over the weekend, showing the relative size of each country’s biggest internet firms, using data from the World Startup Report. But their chart uses a log scale (a system that contracts the scale to include extreme outliers), which underplays the huge differences from country to country. To get an idea of just how much America’s tech industry eclipses those in the rest of the world, we remade the chart in a normal scale:
World Startup Report shows Google as is the biggest internet company in the world, worth more than twice its nearest competitor, China’s Alibaba. (World Startup Report considers Google an internet company but not Apple, which seems about right, considering that the bulk of Apple’s revenue comes from hardware.)
Indeed, you would need to add up the worth of biggest internet firms in the next 24 countries (including Alibaba) before coming anywhere close to Google’s valuation. Add up the next 50 on the list, and the total still exceeds Google’s valuation by only about 2% (just under 10 billion).