The Globe and Mail reports in its Saturday edition that the European Union has long lamented its inability to produce world-scale tech companies. The Globe's Eric Reguly writes that its biggest tech player is ASML, the world's top maker of photolithography machines required to make microchips. It has a market value of $560-billion (U.S.) and registers approximately zero on the public awareness scale. Apple's value is $3.9-trillion (U.S.) -- more than the GDP of France -- and is a household name. There is no equivalent to Tesla or BYD, China's world-beating electric-vehicle company. It has a few big oil and mining companies and one world-class aircraft maker, Airbus. The competition gnomes in Brussel are well aware that even the biggest and the best EU companies struggle to make a splash in the global market, that the tech research and development race is being won by the Americans and the Chinese, and that the true risk-takers live in faraway lands. The EU's woes are well known: excessive regulations, especially on start-up and small companies; spending on research and development at the EU level is tiny compared to the U.S.; and the lack of a true single market deters companies in one country from expanding in another.