Start-ups: These countries and industries have the greatest chances of becoming a unicorn

Enlarge image

Take off into the cloud:

Germany's most valuable unicorn, Celonis, wants to make processes in companies more efficient with its software

Photo: Celonis

Unicorns are conquering the world. According to the market researchers from CB Insights, 253 of these actually rare occurrences were added in the first half of 2021 alone. This means that the herd has almost doubled compared to pre-Corona times. Market researchers currently count 779 unicorns worldwide - that is, start-ups that are worth at least one billion US dollars and are not yet listed on the stock exchange. A record value. Together, the companies are worth a staggering $ 2505 billion.

The British comparison portal Money took another closer look at the current list from CB Insights and examined the countries and industries from which the start-ups that have risen to unicorns the fastest come.

Germany, with its currently 18 unicorns, ranks 14th out of a total of 40 listed nations.

It took an average of eleven years and five months for a start-up in this country to join the herd.

However, this meant that German start-ups still needed almost twice as much time as aspiring companies from China.

The start-ups there broke through the billion dollar threshold after an average of just five years and ten months.

Hong Kong and Japan follow in second and third place.

If you look at the number of unicorns that each country produced, the picture is somewhat different.

According to the comparison portal, most of the unicorns on the current CB Insights list came from the USA: 378 of the 779 start-ups were founded in the United States.

Far behind are China with only 155 unicorns and India with just 34 companies in second and third place.

A fifth of all unicorns are fintechs

In terms of sectors, the auto and transportation industries stand out.

It only took the start-ups an average of four years and five months to reach the billions in valuation.

Most of the unicorns currently come from the fintech segment: Almost a fifth of all unicorns are assigned to this industry.

Artificial intelligence start-ups used to take an average of five years and six months to be classified as unicorns. At five years and only four months, the currently most valuable unicorn in the world, which is assigned to this segment, was slightly below the average: The Chinese Tiktok mother Bytedance is currently valued at 140 billion dollars. The world has been waiting for the IPO here for years. But Beijing's increasingly rigid stance towards its own companies is also deterring Bytedance founder

Zhang Yiming

(38). He recently stated, according to the Wall Street Journal, that “the time for an IPO is not ripe due to the political and regulatory environment.

After the US fintech Stripe (95 billion dollars) and

Elon Musks

' (50) space company SpaceX (74 billion dollars, USA), the fourth most valuable unicorn in the world is followed by a European company - Klarna.

The Swedish fintech is currently valued at $ 45.6 billion.

The first German company on the list is the Munich-based software provider Celonis with a market value of eleven billion dollars, ahead of the online broker Trade Republic from Berlin (5.3 billion dollars) and the prosthesis manufacturer Ottobock from Duderstadt (3.52 billion dollars), who aims to go public in the coming year.

Like many other companies, Ottobock had postponed its IPO several times.

Mainly because of the pandemic, numerous stock market candidates had put their plans on hold for the time being.

Now they want to take advantage of the good mood on the stock markets and take the plunge.

The list of unicorns could therefore get significantly shorter again in the next few months.

mg