7 ms·

I always think there are huge opportunities for growth in intra-EU trade. It's a market with over 500M people and a $17 trillion GDP. While the EU has taken awa

by mslot 10y ago

I always think there are huge opportunities for growth in intra-EU trade. It's a market with over 500M people and a $17 trillion GDP. While the EU has taken away a lot of trade barriers, language and unfamiliar regulations remain a huge barrier, but also a huge potential for growth. If a company in California has ample opportunities to sell in Florida (>2000 miles away), why then is it significantly more difficult for a company in Greece to sell in Denmark, which is a much shorter distance. There is a notable lack of an open European marketplace along the lines of Alibaba. There are many challenges in making that model work for the EU, especially ~24 languages and big cultural differences, but the tech industry is in a good position to overcome such boundaries.

adventured 10y ago
To what extent does the EU need to substantially consolidate language further to become more effective? There are two dozen major languages spoken in the EU. Nearly half of the EU can't communicate well with the other half because they share no common language. How do you get the EU to pursue a standardization of language, such that ~95% of people in the EU are fluent in at least one EU-wide common language (whether Spanish, English or other)?
- narag 10y ago
  That language is already English. Most young people can at least read and write basic English.
  - dx034 10y ago
    But that's a political problem. After the UK quits, only Ireland has English as their native language. While it's easiest to use English across the EU, it's not really desired to have a trade language that is different from all major languages spoken. And in addition to that, even though most young people can communicate well in English doesn't mean they want to shop in an English store. You need to have a very good proficiency (probably C2) to know the English words for all articles you have in your household. But translating a website shouldn't be a big deal anyway.
    - narag 10y ago
      I disagree it's a political problem. Or in other words, it's only a problem if you put politics in it. Let me tell you an old story. I'm spanish. We had in the late 90's a mail list about the Delphi programming environment. Delphi was made by Borland, a private company that had translated the IDE to French and German. At a certain moment there was a vocal group in the list that very insistently demanded that everybody made a petition to Borland to create a Spanish translation of the IDE (the manuals had already been translated). I didn't care, not only because I had already read every manual when Delphi was released, before they were translated, but also because I believed that any pro should know enough English to move around, instead of depending on the ones that had already done the job. I tried to stay away from the discusion until a friend tried to force my hand very publicly with the argument that Spanish was no less important than English in culture or number of speakers or quality programmers... the political problem! So I had to answer the obvious: English was not only important to communicate with English speakers. I can talk with people from Sweden, Russia, Poland, Greece... instead of learning a dozen languages. It's not a matter of what should be, it's a matter of what is! And that was twenty years ago. Today my teen son has no problem chatting in Minecraft with people all around the world. About shopping in an English store, they do. Google Translate works great if there's a problem. There is that musical instruments shop that everybody uses and another of bikes, both in Germany. People are used to the English words for that stuff anyway. The difficult thing, even in local shops is hearing many terms translated. What is a "flanger" called in Spanish? No idea. Or a "chorus", etc. We just used that as is. Household stuff are in local stores, no need to shop them online. Anyway, if you look a little above, you'll see my comment that I think it would be a good idea to create a company that help other companies to operate in a multinational space. I was thinking more on taxes and regulations, but of course decent translations would be nice to have.
- BjoernKW 10y ago
  A large part of the EU population below a certain age is reasonably fluent in English already. It's only a matter of time until that part amounts to 95%. Still, the language of commerce in a country for the most part is the official language of that country. I'm not sure as to what can be done about that.
- pawadu 10y ago
  Beside the old generation from the former eastern block (who studied Russian instead of English) pretty much everyone speaks enough English to communicate. I've traveled to EU a lot and even in a country like France I had zero problems getting by.
  - kbart 10y ago
    "I've traveled to EU a lot and even in a country like France I had zero problems getting by." Only if you travel along established tourist routes. Go to a local marketplace or try to ask for directions in a smaller town and you will find it hard in many EU countries. Yes, in Northern countries even most elders speak English fluently, but in South I have had many situations where finding a single English speaking person was a challenge (notably in Greece and Italy).
    - monodeldiablo 10y ago
      I don't believe it. I live in Croatia and everybody under 30 speaks English beautifully. Almost everybody under 40 speaks functional English. Most people under 50 understand commercial English, even if their grammar is shit. You probably didn't struggle to find an English-speaking person. You struggled to find a person willing to speak English with you. That's a subtle, but important, difference. Most of my neighbors pretend not to understand English around tourists because it saves them enormous hassle. At first, I was appalled when I realized this. Now, I confess to doing it myself. It gets exhausting answering the same questions from unresourceful tourists over and over again. Locals don't want to be your tour guide. They just want to enjoy their coffee in peace.
- cmenge 10y ago
  Agreed. English might be a de-facto standard to some extent and many people use it if they have to. But the truth is, people are lazy and most people find it easy to communicate in their mother tongue and tedious to communicate in English. Look at what happened to facebook when they started offering localized versions, their growth suddenly exploded over here. I believe this will take a long time, and it certainly is a major barrier.
mrweasel 10y ago
You could most likely make a decent living just handling VAT calculations and registration for companies.
- gonzo 10y ago
  And refunds for ex-EU corps
- nickjackson 10y ago
  I've been looking into this a bit, but put off by the fact that EU VAT for digital products isnt really being enforced upon US companies, so not sure there is much of a market for it. Also, as a brit I'm not sure how brexit might screw up the business model.
emptyfile 10y ago
It's actually shocking there's not a EU wide Amazon.
- scottmf 10y ago
  Or telling, perhaps?
  - david927 10y ago
    Bezos is infamous for his ego, and I think he just doesn't see it. Actually, I think that this is the chink in Amazon's armor, the bare patch on Smaug's underside. Only a few European countries have Amazon stores and the brand loyalty for them isn't strong. A single EU store would become quickly popular and has the potential to be bigger than Amazon, given that the EU is larger than the US in market size.
- adventured 10y ago
  There is, it's Amazon. They're closing in on $20 billion in European sales, growing at double digits, with something like 50,000 employees. If you look at what they're doing in Europe, Amazon is getting more aggressive by the year in terms of expanding and investing there.
  - TulliusCicero 10y ago
    I think what the poster was saying is that the major sites are still country-specific, like I moved to Germany and here I use amazon.de, amazon.uk is a different site, so is amazon.fr, etc.
  - klausjensen 10y ago
    I use Amazon in Europa a LOT, but funny enough it is not ONE amazon in EU, it is many - and I have to search for products on all of them, because what is available in amazon.de might not be available in amazon.co.uk. And there are obviously language barriers - and having to do math to convert currencies etc. It is anything but smooth right now - unless you are in one of the countries, that have their own amazon.tld, of course. I want amazon.eu, where I can filter by products, that can actually be shipped to my EU country - one stop shopping. I would probably stop buying online from local shops in my country entirely.
BjoernKW 10y ago
How would you suggest going about overcoming these differences? I live in the EU. I've thought about this for some time and I can't really think of a scalable approach. One aspect of the problem is taxes and regulations, which for the most part has to be addressed politically. The different jurisdictions are a cause for friction, too. The even more significant barrier however is the linguistic and cultural one. It's not sufficient to just translate a say English language website to French in order to start selling in France (and providing proper idiomatic translations for each of the main EU languages is difficult enough). There are cultural differences right down to which website designs are popular in any given EU country at a time. You often can tell where a website is 'located' just by looking at its design.
- narag 10y ago
  Then the opportunity could be creating a company that solves these problems for other companies.
  - csl 10y ago
    So, a consultancy company then? Which we all know only scales with the number of employees. Most people in Europe use Gmail, right? So they must already have figured out this stuff.
    - narag 10y ago
      So, a consultancy company then? No.
    - matthewmacleod 10y ago
      No, I don't think that's necessary. It immediately seems like a platform specifically designed to support things like EU-wide compliance, marketing, payments and other business functions could potentially be beneficial to a wide variety of businesses.
    - fragmede 10y ago
      Selling Gmail (ad's or hosted apps) isn't intra-EU trade (in so far as Google's an American company headquartered in Mountain View, though they do have many offices in the EU). The implication of a consultancy company is that their work is done ad-hoc and in a one-off fashion, requiring lots of work from the company which stupidly only scales with the number of employees. Software that successfully automated away the most toilsome parts of the job, allowing a handful of people to support intra-EU between any of the 28 member countries would do quite well.
TillE 10y ago
It's amazing how much you pay for UK products in Germany, way way more than the cost of shipping. Of course that particular opportunity will be gone soon, but I'm sure there are other routes.
- david927 10y ago
  The UK is not in the EU (and was never in Schengen), so you pay customs along as well as shipping.
  - cromulent 10y ago
    The UK is in the EU, so you shouldn't be paying customs.
    - david927 10y ago
      Aha, the process of the UK leaving the EU is expected be triggered at the end of next month. Apologies.
      - dx034 10y ago
        And it won't leave for at least another 2 years, longer with a transitional period.
irq-1 10y ago
> If a company in California has ample opportunities to sell in Florida (>2000 miles away), why then is it significantly more difficult for a company in Greece to sell in Denmark, which is a much shorter distance. The US has a federal "interstate commerce clause" which means that individual states cannot regulate trade with other states. The federal government has all the control, which would be like the European Union having control. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commerce_Clause https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commerce_Clause
- david927 10y ago
  And the EU has the equivalent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schengen_Area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schengen_Area
  - ovidnis 10y ago
    Are those two equivalent though? As I understand the Schengen Area is about freedom of movement whereas the Commerce Clause is about, well, commerce.
    - germanier 10y ago
      No, they are not really. Schengen is mostly about border controls. For example, Switzerland is in Schengen but they are not part of the EU customs zone, so goods cannot be freely moved across the border (although there are a lot of bilateral treaties to make this easier). But the EU has their own version of the Commerce Clause, the Common Market.
- germanier 10y ago
  The US version is a bit more far-reaching but the Common Market[1] allows me to sell almost anything in any EU country. Incidentally, Amazon is one such example. If I buy something on the German amazon.de the contract is formed with Amazon EU S.à r.l. in Luxemburg and the goods are often shipped from a Polish warehouse. The difficulties companies face within the EU are largely language and culture related rather than legal. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Single_Market https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Single_Market

by mslot 10y ago

adventured 10y ago

To what extent does the EU need to substantially consolidate language further to become more effective? There are two dozen major languages spoken in the EU. Nearly half of the EU can't communicate well with the other half because they share no common language. How do you get the EU to pursue a standardization of language, such that ~95% of people in the EU are fluent in at least one EU-wide common language (whether Spanish, English or other)?

narag 10y ago
That language is already English. Most young people can at least read and write basic English.
- dx034 10y ago
  But that's a political problem. After the UK quits, only Ireland has English as their native language. While it's easiest to use English across the EU, it's not really desired to have a trade language that is different from all major languages spoken. And in addition to that, even though most young people can communicate well in English doesn't mean they want to shop in an English store. You need to have a very good proficiency (probably C2) to know the English words for all articles you have in your household. But translating a website shouldn't be a big deal anyway.
  - narag 10y ago
    I disagree it's a political problem. Or in other words, it's only a problem if you put politics in it. Let me tell you an old story. I'm spanish. We had in the late 90's a mail list about the Delphi programming environment. Delphi was made by Borland, a private company that had translated the IDE to French and German. At a certain moment there was a vocal group in the list that very insistently demanded that everybody made a petition to Borland to create a Spanish translation of the IDE (the manuals had already been translated). I didn't care, not only because I had already read every manual when Delphi was released, before they were translated, but also because I believed that any pro should know enough English to move around, instead of depending on the ones that had already done the job. I tried to stay away from the discusion until a friend tried to force my hand very publicly with the argument that Spanish was no less important than English in culture or number of speakers or quality programmers... the political problem! So I had to answer the obvious: English was not only important to communicate with English speakers. I can talk with people from Sweden, Russia, Poland, Greece... instead of learning a dozen languages. It's not a matter of what should be, it's a matter of what is! And that was twenty years ago. Today my teen son has no problem chatting in Minecraft with people all around the world. About shopping in an English store, they do. Google Translate works great if there's a problem. There is that musical instruments shop that everybody uses and another of bikes, both in Germany. People are used to the English words for that stuff anyway. The difficult thing, even in local shops is hearing many terms translated. What is a "flanger" called in Spanish? No idea. Or a "chorus", etc. We just used that as is. Household stuff are in local stores, no need to shop them online. Anyway, if you look a little above, you'll see my comment that I think it would be a good idea to create a company that help other companies to operate in a multinational space. I was thinking more on taxes and regulations, but of course decent translations would be nice to have.
BjoernKW 10y ago
A large part of the EU population below a certain age is reasonably fluent in English already. It's only a matter of time until that part amounts to 95%. Still, the language of commerce in a country for the most part is the official language of that country. I'm not sure as to what can be done about that.
pawadu 10y ago
Beside the old generation from the former eastern block (who studied Russian instead of English) pretty much everyone speaks enough English to communicate. I've traveled to EU a lot and even in a country like France I had zero problems getting by.
- kbart 10y ago
  "I've traveled to EU a lot and even in a country like France I had zero problems getting by." Only if you travel along established tourist routes. Go to a local marketplace or try to ask for directions in a smaller town and you will find it hard in many EU countries. Yes, in Northern countries even most elders speak English fluently, but in South I have had many situations where finding a single English speaking person was a challenge (notably in Greece and Italy).
  - monodeldiablo 10y ago
    I don't believe it. I live in Croatia and everybody under 30 speaks English beautifully. Almost everybody under 40 speaks functional English. Most people under 50 understand commercial English, even if their grammar is shit. You probably didn't struggle to find an English-speaking person. You struggled to find a person willing to speak English with you. That's a subtle, but important, difference. Most of my neighbors pretend not to understand English around tourists because it saves them enormous hassle. At first, I was appalled when I realized this. Now, I confess to doing it myself. It gets exhausting answering the same questions from unresourceful tourists over and over again. Locals don't want to be your tour guide. They just want to enjoy their coffee in peace.
cmenge 10y ago
Agreed. English might be a de-facto standard to some extent and many people use it if they have to. But the truth is, people are lazy and most people find it easy to communicate in their mother tongue and tedious to communicate in English. Look at what happened to facebook when they started offering localized versions, their growth suddenly exploded over here. I believe this will take a long time, and it certainly is a major barrier.

mrweasel 10y ago

You could most likely make a decent living just handling VAT calculations and registration for companies.

gonzo 10y ago
And refunds for ex-EU corps
nickjackson 10y ago
I've been looking into this a bit, but put off by the fact that EU VAT for digital products isnt really being enforced upon US companies, so not sure there is much of a market for it. Also, as a brit I'm not sure how brexit might screw up the business model.

emptyfile 10y ago

It's actually shocking there's not a EU wide Amazon.

scottmf 10y ago
Or telling, perhaps?
- david927 10y ago
  Bezos is infamous for his ego, and I think he just doesn't see it. Actually, I think that this is the chink in Amazon's armor, the bare patch on Smaug's underside. Only a few European countries have Amazon stores and the brand loyalty for them isn't strong. A single EU store would become quickly popular and has the potential to be bigger than Amazon, given that the EU is larger than the US in market size.
adventured 10y ago
There is, it's Amazon. They're closing in on $20 billion in European sales, growing at double digits, with something like 50,000 employees. If you look at what they're doing in Europe, Amazon is getting more aggressive by the year in terms of expanding and investing there.
- TulliusCicero 10y ago
  I think what the poster was saying is that the major sites are still country-specific, like I moved to Germany and here I use amazon.de, amazon.uk is a different site, so is amazon.fr, etc.
- klausjensen 10y ago
  I use Amazon in Europa a LOT, but funny enough it is not ONE amazon in EU, it is many - and I have to search for products on all of them, because what is available in amazon.de might not be available in amazon.co.uk. And there are obviously language barriers - and having to do math to convert currencies etc. It is anything but smooth right now - unless you are in one of the countries, that have their own amazon.tld, of course. I want amazon.eu, where I can filter by products, that can actually be shipped to my EU country - one stop shopping. I would probably stop buying online from local shops in my country entirely.

BjoernKW 10y ago

How would you suggest going about overcoming these differences? I live in the EU. I've thought about this for some time and I can't really think of a scalable approach. One aspect of the problem is taxes and regulations, which for the most part has to be addressed politically. The different jurisdictions are a cause for friction, too. The even more significant barrier however is the linguistic and cultural one. It's not sufficient to just translate a say English language website to French in order to start selling in France (and providing proper idiomatic translations for each of the main EU languages is difficult enough). There are cultural differences right down to which website designs are popular in any given EU country at a time. You often can tell where a website is 'located' just by looking at its design.

narag 10y ago
Then the opportunity could be creating a company that solves these problems for other companies.
- csl 10y ago
  So, a consultancy company then? Which we all know only scales with the number of employees. Most people in Europe use Gmail, right? So they must already have figured out this stuff.
  - narag 10y ago
    So, a consultancy company then? No.
  - matthewmacleod 10y ago
    No, I don't think that's necessary. It immediately seems like a platform specifically designed to support things like EU-wide compliance, marketing, payments and other business functions could potentially be beneficial to a wide variety of businesses.
  - fragmede 10y ago
    Selling Gmail (ad's or hosted apps) isn't intra-EU trade (in so far as Google's an American company headquartered in Mountain View, though they do have many offices in the EU). The implication of a consultancy company is that their work is done ad-hoc and in a one-off fashion, requiring lots of work from the company which stupidly only scales with the number of employees. Software that successfully automated away the most toilsome parts of the job, allowing a handful of people to support intra-EU between any of the 28 member countries would do quite well.

TillE 10y ago

It's amazing how much you pay for UK products in Germany, way way more than the cost of shipping. Of course that particular opportunity will be gone soon, but I'm sure there are other routes.

david927 10y ago
The UK is not in the EU (and was never in Schengen), so you pay customs along as well as shipping.
- cromulent 10y ago
  The UK is in the EU, so you shouldn't be paying customs.
  - david927 10y ago
    Aha, the process of the UK leaving the EU is expected be triggered at the end of next month. Apologies.
    - dx034 10y ago
      And it won't leave for at least another 2 years, longer with a transitional period.

irq-1 10y ago

> If a company in California has ample opportunities to sell in Florida (>2000 miles away), why then is it significantly more difficult for a company in Greece to sell in Denmark, which is a much shorter distance. The US has a federal "interstate commerce clause" which means that individual states cannot regulate trade with other states. The federal government has all the control, which would be like the European Union having control. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commerce_Clause https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commerce_Clause

david927 10y ago
And the EU has the equivalent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schengen_Area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schengen_Area
- ovidnis 10y ago
  Are those two equivalent though? As I understand the Schengen Area is about freedom of movement whereas the Commerce Clause is about, well, commerce.
  - germanier 10y ago
    No, they are not really. Schengen is mostly about border controls. For example, Switzerland is in Schengen but they are not part of the EU customs zone, so goods cannot be freely moved across the border (although there are a lot of bilateral treaties to make this easier). But the EU has their own version of the Commerce Clause, the Common Market.
germanier 10y ago
The US version is a bit more far-reaching but the Common Market[1] allows me to sell almost anything in any EU country. Incidentally, Amazon is one such example. If I buy something on the German amazon.de the contract is formed with Amazon EU S.à r.l. in Luxemburg and the goods are often shipped from a Polish warehouse. The difficulties companies face within the EU are largely language and culture related rather than legal. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Single_Market https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Single_Market