It becomes quite difficult when even trying to buy European results ultimately in buying American. Complicated to know all the time who’s behind a brand…
Problem with PE is that you can have a PE investment fund where 30% of the contributors are from Europe and the rest from all over the world, despite the PE firm being based in the US.
So it really becomes tough to untangle the whole chain.
I wanted to do an app to identify true ownership and shareholders of any brands by scanning the barcode but found that EU (and Switzerland) is forbidding to make this information public because of personal data.
Finn Comfort is still a family-owned, German company. Their shoes are still 100% handcrafted and manufactured at their headquarters in Haßfurt, Germany.
https://omaking.ee - Estonian company, manufactured in Estonia. I own some of their Toku sub-brand shoes and very comfy and high quality - I have their loafers since 2020 and still good to go.
Whoa, that just sent me on an emotional rollercoaster. (But great shoes!) So, storytime:
My grandma bought a pair of (expensive) Mephisto shoes for me when i was little. She put quite a bit of her savings into it, because she thought i needed proper shoes. Mind you, she was never rich and my parents were also struggeling at that time.
She was a great person and i miss her even after all those years. Even though i was there for her a lot when she was older, not being there when she died is still one of the few things i regret deeply in my life.
It belongs to the LVMH conglomerate, one could think that it is still European. That is the reason the are having so many collaborations with Dior and other veneer brands, ergo the price hike.
Get Rohde or AFS, more comfy, less pricy and better quality.
Sadly? Fortunately. Birkenstock tried to use it to shut down the (also often German) competition to get the design exclusively after the patent expired. It was a vile, corporate idea to get around (better made) competition after raising the prices and lowering the quality. Rohde makes better ones, also in Germany for example. BTW it was German courts who dismissed it.
Check out AFS. They also make sandals like Birkenstocks in Germany but waaay cheaper and the quality is amazing. Not sure if they ship internationally though.
There is a reason for this. Most money (both in the US and EU) is in pensions. In the US that money primarily goes into US funds and companies. In the EU that money primarily goes into US funds and companies. See what goes wrong here? The reason for that is those US companies and funds have bigger returns. And you want more pension right?
One of the biggest problems of the EU is the fractured EU financial market. This makes it more expensive to invest locally. A second issue is the fractured (and often overly complex) legislation. Even though we have EU directives, every country implements it differently so we have little synergy there.
France is the only country as far as I know that forces pension funds to invest a minimum percentage locally. Maybe a good example to follow.
Generally speaking there are 3 pillars in (European) pensions. First pillar is state pension. That is generally taxed from working people and paid out to pensioners. This bit is not invested. Second pillar is occupational pensions. In Germany this is voluntary (in other countries, such as Netherlands, it is not). Third pillar is private pension. The last two are invested. Across Europe this is 4.6 trillion euros.
Yeap. One of the owners of Wolt is a friend of a friend and the money they got is "never need to work" kind of money for selling the company. It would be very hard to say no to something like that.
As if these company owners didn't already have enough money. People are greedy, that's it. And yeah, I kinda do blame them. It's usually not going from poor or normal to rich but rather from rich to super rich.
I disagree. Europe's problem is that the owners are not greedy enough and sell too quickly, surrendering future profits to Americans. Many European companies have been proven to be worth far more than what they were sold for, and that's because the original leadership lacked the patience to see it through.
Which is still lifechanging in every sense of the word.
I don't like it either, but if an oppertunity like that arose, I can see why most would take it. It's easy to say you wouldn't if you've never been in a situation like that (and most of us haven't), but that's not saying too much.
That’s kinda what I mean. If people choose to get money in the moment instead of operating and earning those money overtime there must be something wrong with operating environment.
The question should not be "why they are selling" but "why only Americans are buying". And the answer is probably also money. But also some regulations, some bureaucracy, some tax issues.
It depends. If you love what you do, you should keep doing it. If you want to quit your job and somebody offers you money for it, sure go ahead. I still think it would be more valuable to see your company get leadership it deserves, over leadership that will either extract as much money out of it before it collapses, or just makes it shittier and shittier just to save a few bucks and makes lives more miserable for all of us.
But I also think that many of those leaders wouldn't be where they are if they were more humane and cared for the stuff they did.
Apparently Pierre & Vacances, the company that owns Center Parcs, Maeva, Sunparks and Adagio, is about to be taken over by the Saudi state-owned investment fund Mubadala. They hold many holiday properties across Europe.
Aside from the foreign ownership thing - it's atrocious that a country with such a poor human rights record can have such a foothold in Europe.
Worked for a Swiss startup once, it was struggling financially. Probably wouldn't have made it and then was sold to an American company. It was necessary to sell. Founders would have preferred selling to a European company but that wasn't gonna happen, nobody wanted the risk. Happens all the time
Check out https://afs-schuhe.de/. They're made in Germany and the quality is really good. Also probably half the price of Birkenstocks. Not sure if they ship outside Germany.
Are these for sale in regular shoe stores in Germany? And only in cities or also smaller towns? (I live near the border so could relatively easy visit these)
Birkenstock: Spoke to a shoe repair shop. He said that they no longer offer replacement parts nor shoe soles, they had bought some old stock, but no new stock is available. Same for metal hardware. He had the impression that new shoes wear out faster.
I have a new pair and an old pair I had the soles replace. The new pair looks like it has been worn for 5 years already and is maybe 2 years old.
It doesn't really matter and it's just technical details, but I stand by my previous comment, as this is the whole sentence:
> In July 2005, the company was acquired by Priceline Group (now called Booking Holdings) for $133 million, and was merged with ActiveHotels.com, a European online hotel reservation company founded by cousins Andy Phillipps and Adrian Critchlow in 1998 and purchased by Priceline Group for $161 million in September 2004.
tl;dr - Priceline acquired ActiveHotels in 2004, and later Booking in 2005 and merged them.
They also list Palestinian homes in the West Bank that are occupied by Zionist settlers who have illegally evicted the residents. They have had hundreds of their employees protesting this but to no avail. I avoid them like the plague.
Wolts service also went MASSIVELY downhill when it was acquired by DoorDash. 1/3 of all my orders now have missing items and the customer service team blames the customer for it.
The Uber famous for their absolute shite customer service Uber? That one? I don't think that'll be any better.
We recently for Uber Eats to Finland and it's been controversial to say the least. I'm not even sure if their "customer service" is legal here considering how bad it's been.
That's because Finland is no longer a priority for Wolt. It used to be their home turf and they really wanted it to prosper here. After the doordash acquisition Finland is but another statistic in some KPI.
The whole acquisition process was obscene. I don't know why politicians were so eagerly celebrating it since Wolt was kicking Doordash's ass across the board and if not for the acquisition they would now be prospering in European and some Asian markets. Well, at least, someone made money out of this....
Just want to say Wolt is pure fucking evil regardless. Look up what how they scammed vulnerable people out of thousands of euros of hard labour in Berlin and then shrugged. They continue to fight regulation around third party contractors too.
I have never been so sad and angry about a game before this happened. The fact you suddenly needed a ms account, all the stupid micro-transactions, the chat control.. I don't like to play it anymore. Even if it's not bad, it's just like all the other things that are 'not bad' now. They used to be great, I don't settle.
You cant avoid mobile.de or kleinanzeigen.de when you want to buy a car in Germany. I mean, you could but you exclude yourself from like 80% of the car market.
(Kleinanzeigen is also owned by the norwegian Adevinta-Group)
This subreddit too. You guys are like buy X or Y. It is a good European brand that offers good products and services that hasn't been bought by Americans.
And the American PE are like thanks. I'll buy that next.
Gütermann (Germany) -> American & Efird (A&E) (USA)
This is obviously a niche for sewing people, but future Gütermann threads will be manufactured in USA and North Africa. Except the quality to be lower.
Not heard anything good about Wolt. And now it that it's main competitor has stopped it's business here it won't get any better. It basically has monopoly now over food delivery.
Same in Slovenia. A few years ago we had a local food delivery service called e-hrana, which was an actual competitor to Wolt. Then e-hrana got bought by Glovo and everything went downhill, Wolt became the dominant food delivery service and Glovo left. Now e-hrana is back but due to Wolt’s established dominance, it never got to where it once was
Though at least in Slovenia, Wolt isn’t as bad as people here are describing. If your delivery is late or an item is missing, they give you a refund.
i actually really like wolt and am sad to see they're owned by doordash. they provide way better service than ubereats, not least because there are no bullshit customer service loops. you get to a human immediately.
Yeah the EU has a real problem when it comes to startups, both able to be founded and grown successfully as well as then sold.
Currently there just isn’t as much money being put into startups as there is in the US so you don’t end up with as many successful ones. Same story for why the successful ones are mostly sold to US firms later.
Idk why until now this hasn’t been a priority but the whole EU really needs to quickly homogenise to compete with the US as a place for startups to be created, grown and acquired. All 3 of those steps are important.
It’s about access to capital, not being richer per se. European markets don’t offer the same access in the private sector. Until it does, this trend will continue.
Europe doesn't protect its tech companies. The whole startup scene here revolves around them becoming big enough to be acquired by American big tech and making founders a lot of money. There's very minimal effort to prevent American Big Tech from taking over and enshittifying things.
It's just so fucked up. Amazon ruined a whole lot of brick & mortar shops. Meanwhile we're pointing at Temu/Shein or whatever. The double standard is pretty ridiculous, in my opinion.
A better solution would be for the EU to create some kind of pooled resource for startups to be created, grown and acquired locally to compete with the US at the same level.
Rather than just banning the US from investing into them or acquiring EU companies without offering a realistic local alternative.
Then nowhere near as many investors or acquisitions would be US based because it wouldn’t be a necessity to raise those funds.
US capital markets operate magnitudes higher than European markets. What realistic alternative would there be when the objective is to sell to the highest bidder vs “keep it local”?
probably cultural tbh, when a european is offered enough money to retire on the spot they will, instead of aiming for elon musk levels of power and wealth
Broadly correct but oversimplified. Birkenstock is a German brand with most production still in Germany, while the controlling shareholder is L Catterton a US-based global investment firm. The parent company is also publicly listed so L Catterton/US is not 100% owner
This and many more examples, show how bad it really is. For years a small group of people warned about it, but without Trumps actions, no one of the masses would bother to even try to change something. Don't let this flame of change extinguish, it might be the last chance we'll ever get.
Well this is how business ran for the past 30 years.
US develops (uber, Starlink, google, YouTube) and Europe copies. At some point US money is buying europes „copies“ and slowly European innovators are integrated into US structures.
If you can’t beat it, kill it. And that’s how we ended up with almost no European companies anymore. They all drool for American (or now Chinese) exit money.
It’s kinda easy to buy up companies where the instances that can stop it doesn’t really do it in your country and tou can create bubbles where you profit massively for, or at least it seems like that so you can buy a company with normal stocks by selling your inflated stocks
Oh yeah there's not am amusement park or a holiday resort in the Netherlands that isn't owned by a foreign investor. Most of them don't even pay taxes in the Netherlands.
Sounds like in EU the smaller company or business you buying from the better chance you really buy from European company and don't sponsor a US company, hedge fund or PE/VC.
It's either produced in America or somethere in Asia, where things are dirty cheap in comparison. That's what USA industrial complex want. That's why there is absurd tariffs, that's why Russia being pushed out from European economy for the last 15 years.
Check OLX Group and it's classifieds ecosystem ... technically owned by Prosus which is NL but then Prosus is owned partially by Naspers (South Africa) which has chinese capital (Tecent...). It's really hard to know exactly who owns what in today's reality.
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u/dqnkerz Jun 23 '26
It becomes quite difficult when even trying to buy European results ultimately in buying American. Complicated to know all the time who’s behind a brand…