There are roughly 1500 mid-sized companies in Germany which are among the world-leaders in their tech sector. You may never have heard it, but Elon Musk runs his factories with process automation from Germany (he bought a company) and robots from Kuka/Germany.
Germany alone has roughly half of all so-called hidden-champions world-wide. Many of them are in High-tech.
Europe lacks the large internet and software companies. Though T-Mobile is German and known in the US. SAP provides the software which runs large enterprises. But high-tech is much more, it's factory automation, it's aerospace (think Airbus), it's biotech (think Biontech), ... Soft- and hardware are a crucial factor for those.
The Mittelstand is pretty much the only reason why Germany's prosperity is still a thing. Countries like Italy and Spain, which lack this backbone of mid-sized companies, are in deep trouble and unlikely to get out of it.
But there were times when German companies actually were world leaders in the big things as well, not just reliable suppliers to foreign big players. Don't you count this as a regression?
> But there were times when German companies actually were world leaders in the big things as well
We have the world leader in civil aerospace in France/Germany, Many high-speed trains in the world are coming from France or Germany. There are many large high-tech sectors.
It's nice that Estonia is successful, but it's not where the next big chip manufacturing sites will be build. Intel and TSMC are in talks to move to the former East Germany (Saxony has roughly 70000 employees already in the chip manufacturing industry). The big Internet exchange node is in Frankfurt.
The EU has a lot to catch up in many countries, but it's not that we have no high-tech.
The trouble is that this has been known since at least the late 1990s, discussed quite often, plans made, and yet the gap hasn't grown appreciably smaller. It has arguably widened. 15 years ago, you could choose from a plentitude of European feature phones. Now the vast majority of our own mobile phone market is dominated by US or East Asian products.
The more important is to use the EU to create the large market which is needed.
Btw., I'm a happy user of a bunch of US tech products. It's not that I need to replace all that. I want the EU to be competitive, but I'm also using other stuff. Apple in the recent years made some excellent product technology, like their chips, which are produced in Taiwan, also with a lot of technology from Europe.
> love trains -- but planes are usually a better solution than high-speed trains.
Not for short to medium distances they're not. Everything under 3-4 hours of train is faster, more comfortable and with much less hassle than flying (going to an airport, security checks, uncomfortable seating, interruptions for take off and landing, long queueing).
Both? Good and broad infrastructure is expensive. I was using a new plane with onboard Internet, two modern airports, three modern high-speed trains, three large train stations, driving through a clean and nice landscape. My local train line in my home town is fully digitalized and prepared for autonomous trains. Plus I made a stop in a town where Carl Friedrich Gauß was born in 1777, which was inspiring.
Germany alone has roughly half of all so-called hidden-champions world-wide. Many of them are in High-tech.
Europe lacks the large internet and software companies. Though T-Mobile is German and known in the US. SAP provides the software which runs large enterprises. But high-tech is much more, it's factory automation, it's aerospace (think Airbus), it's biotech (think Biontech), ... Soft- and hardware are a crucial factor for those.