[joe_mamba]

ASML is over 30 years old. It also has a massive IP and financial moat that's impossible to replicate by start-ups competitors seeking to disrupt it. Labor laws don't matter at this point as that's not the limiting factor, it's IP and capital.

But SW can be much more easily disrupted, and if you can move faster and stay leaner than your EU competitors due to laxer laws, then you will win. SW success is often about time to market, not IP, since a lot of companies and countries can build a Airbnb, a Booking.com, a Spotify, etc there's no rocket science, they dominated because they were first to market but they can also be easily disrupted by other SW companies if they drop the ball and piss off their userbase as the cost of building SW is much cheaper than building an EU machine.

Also, there's a reason people can only name ASML as EU's shining examples but nothing else.

[wsng]

booking.com is in NL, and Spotify in SE. Both outcompeted quite some US competitors.

I would add Hetzner as an example that EU labor laws are no obstacle to being competitive with US companies.