“It’s typically European to debate for ages while things are being decided elsewhere,” said Claudia Nemat, regional chief at Deutsche Telekom AG, Europe’s biggest phone company. “That’s not what I consider technology leadership. We’ve got to go for it, set the pace.”
Out of 50 countries assessed by the Digital Evolution Index, created by the Fletcher School at Tufts University, nine of the 10 that have registered the least improvement in technological innovation between 2008 and 2013 are in Europe.
Capitalization Divide
Investors agree with the Tufts scholars. Over the past year, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft Corp. and Amazon.com Inc. have added a total of $400 billion to their market capitalization, for a combined value of $1.5 trillion. Their increase alone is more than the entire value of Europe’s four largest carriers, which together have capitalizations of $260 billion, up about $60 billion from a year ago.
And erstwhile industry leaders from the region have been taken over by U.S. rivals. A year and a half ago, Microsoft bought Nokia Oyj’s handset business for $7 billion, a fraction of the $250 billion the Finnish company was worth at its peak in 2000. Qualcomm Inc. in October agreed to buy U.K. chipmaker CSR Plc for about $2.5 billion to gain technology that lets machines communicate with each other.
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