Last March, TechCrunch covered one of the World Startup Report‘s first releases. Now the organization is back with an ambitious project that gathers insight from 150 companies in 50 countries with the idea of guiding aspiring entrepreneurs in different markets.
The World Startup Report, which was founded by Bowei Gai (whose company CardMuncher was acquired by LinkedIn in 2011), and Startup Genome‘s latest paper is called “Internet Hall Of Fame: 10 Things You Need To Know About The World of Internet Companies Across 50 Countries.”
The Internet Hall of Fame also includes a site with tons of valuable information gleaned from examining the biggest three Internet companies in each of 50 countries. Data comes from online sources, stock market data, company information, and people working within startups in each place.
The whole thing is worth a read, but here are some of the most interesting facts covered by the Internet Hall of Fame:
- 29 countries have at least one Internet company worth $1 billion. Unless you have been hiding under a rock, you’ve heard of Google ($410 billion) and Alibaba Group ($200 billion). Lesser known members of the club (at least to readers in the U.S.), however, include search engine Yandex of Russia ($15.8 billion); Israel’s Checkpoint, the security software maker ($13.6 billion); search portal Naver in South Korea ($28 billion); and media company Naspers in South Africa ($46 billion).
- On average, communication is the most valuable Internet industry. The World Startup Report found that the average value of companies in the communication industry is close to $20 billion, compared to media companies, which are worth around $5 billion.
- Out of 150 companies studied, public companies are on average worth $25 billion, or six times more than private companies ($4 billion), which in turn are 10 times more valuable than the average value of acquisitions.
- On average, most search companies started just before 2000, and gaming companies in 2001, making them the world’s “most mature” Internet industries. On the other hand, the B2B industry has the highest number of companies that were launched around 2006 and “deserve to be called the ‘quickest way to get rich,'” the World Startup Report says.
- One of the most intriguing facts is that Europe does not currently have an Internet company in the top 10, but took the largest number of spots (eight) in the 11th to 20th positions. The report states that “though Europe does not have a large enough market to compete with dominant powerhouses such as the U.S. or China, its countries are large enough to enable company valuations about $1 billion. European companies looking to scale should learn from Australia, where a relatively small local market is leveraged well enough to expand globally.”
- On average, it took seven to 10 years to build a company worth over $1 billion.
For more information and infographics, check out the Internet Hall of Fame here.
Image by Flickr user Alexander Kaiser used under a Creative Commons 2.0 license