The Venezuela moment
May not happen in Europe. But only
Because they are not worth acquiring.
Volks Wagon (VW) for decades was considered as the ” German Industrial Miracle”. In Q3 2025, VW posted a net loss of €1.07 billion. In December VW officially halted vehicle production in its famous “Transparent factory” in Dresden.
Industries in developed countries will never learn to compete with Chinese or Indian competition. They are way too affluent to be able to survive on those margins. These are entire populations which grew up in greenhouses. They are not capable of surviving in the wild. As these digital natives grew up, they were able to improve their productivity and move up the value chain. This helped them to further upgrade their quality of life. no one wanted to or needed to really do any work.
Management pandits spoke of core competency & value retention. Essentially that you could sell a usd 1 Barbie doll or medicine pill for usd 10. So focus on the usd 9 value addition. It was called brand premium. So manufacturing was outsourced to the Chinese.
The developed economies focused on regulatory capture. A polite word for debauched lobbyists and corrupt politicians creating regulatory barriers to free trade and passing on the benefits of low production cost to end consumers. The result was that something which cost a dollar to make was retailing for usd 10.
And then martech happened. And with it came Big Tech. Scoundrels and pirates of the internet age. They plundered your data and sold your privacy. “Free” became the radical price of the internet. Big tech generated so much profit and so much valuation that they could control not just industries but countries. They could influence elections and mindset’s, technology and policies.
Facebook sold the stolen data to Cambridge Analytica and Donald Trump was created. Result of the worlds first election influenced by stolen private data. Mind you, he will probably go down in history as the greatest human leader – but whilst he lasts, he could destroy the very institutions that kept wars at bay and facilitated an increase in human lifespan.
The ONE THING few realise is that the age of pirated data killed almost every consumer brand outside of America or American ownership. Sony, Philips, Nokia, Cadbury, virgin, Kellogg, Ericsson, toshiba, jvc, Thomson …… all became American. So much so that outside of luxury and commodities – every brand is American. It never was.
It didn’t stop there.
The Chinese figured out mfg. but more important they learned to make their own capital goods and to capture natural resources.
Now they knew how to make the doll. It wasn’t too hard to figure out how to brand it. The Europeans no longer knew how to make the doll and the Americans had the brands. For the Chinese market, China built its own brand.
That in summary is the rise of the new age. The end of brand premium. And thus the impoverishment of Europe.
Europe is now ripe for invasion.
