The German startup ecosystem is off to a strong start in 2026: Between January and June, 3,053 new startups were founded. This represents a 52 percent increase compared to the second half of 2025 and means more startups were founded than in all of 2024.
It’s honestly more common cultural differences makes companies incapable of scaling outside of the cultures they were created in
Walmart doesn’t exist in Europe. How come?
But if any company manages to scale across all of Europe, they’re commonly able to expand to any location on the globe. The same can’t be said for single national American mega corps.
Walmart has a huge variety of products, which are low value dense and need to be restocked a lot. At the same time people are generally price sensitive. Delivering a full truck of a single brand of say frozen pizza to a store is probably overkill. As in it requires a lot of storage space in the store until it is sold. That increases cost. So you need to take in the truck into a distribution centre and then send trucks with all kinds of frozen products to multiple stores. That creates a pretty strong moat. Combine that with culture and branding and it becomes really hard to enter a market.
If you have fewer products to sell, that becomes a lot easier. McDonalds has been able to set up restaurants all over the world. Thanks to having a pretty limited number of products to sell. That is also how German supermarket brands like ALDI and LIDL have been able to conquer most of Europe.
Actually, Walmart doesn’t exist in Germany anymore. They tried, but US work conditions clashed with unions, and stuff like Walmart greeters was really creepy to germans, which is why they didn’t like to shop there. So, at least for Germany, the main reason Walmart doesn’t exist here is cultural
Walmart bought British Asda a few years later. They sold it since, but it worked out decently well for them. They also own stores in a lot of other countries outside of Europe, which certainly have a different culture.