Europe's tech scene is booming and considering the amount of venture capital investment within the continent it's not slowing down. From Spotify to HelloFresh and TransferWise to Booking.com the success of companies isn't restricted to any single country. London & Paris are well established hubs, along with Berlin which has been on a rapid growth recently. I hear Eastern Europe is also on the rise.
Here is a visual representation of Europe's fastest growing companies as listed in the FT 1000.
Process:
I scraped the list from the Financial Times website, looking at it's HTML & CSS in order to run some analysis.
Numeric visualizations with matplotlib & seaborn
Geographic visualizations with bokeh & geopandas
Find the full code on my github.
COUNTRY LEVEL DISTRIBUTION
Germany & Italy top the list.
The distribution clearly skews towards a few major countries - with the top 4 countries consisting of over 70% of companies on the list. Germany & Italy top the list with nearly 200 companies each and France and UK with around 170 each. After a big drop in aggregates, Spain and Poland come in next with 50-70 companies.
As expected, London, Paris & Berlin most likely contributing to the proliferation of those countries on the list. I was surprised to see Italy near the top though. I also expected the Scandinavian countries to have a larger part - given some of its big names (Spotify, Klarna, Supercell, King).
INDUSTRY DISTRIBUTION
Technology companies account for nearly 1/5th of list.
The technology sector dominates the list. I wasn't sure what support services entailed, but spot checking some of the top companies in that sector it seems to reference HR, education, lifestyle services. Interestingly construction and industrial goods are fast growing as well. Some of the more governmental industries such as law, health and aerospace & defense are at the bottom of the list.
Next I took a look at whether specific countries indexed higher on some sectors vs. others.
GEOGRAPHIC DISTRIBUTION FOR EACH SECTOR
Different industries index higher in different countries.
Countries ordered from most to least distribution left to right
Industries ordered similarly from top to bottom
Values based on country percentage for a given industry (ie. each industry total = 100%)
One of the more obvious skews is for Financial Services and Fintech, where more than half are based in the UK. Fintech has no presence in the top countries of Germany and Italy but appear in some of the lower indexed countries, Belgium and Switzerland. Italy tops advertising while France tops Retail & Management Consulting. The list of German companies are slightly more diverse. It tops a couple of the industries within the top 10, but maintains a relatively widespread.
Upcoming will be a deeper dive into the tech industry. Stay tuned.
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