Google’s acquisitions – a European take

The graphic towards the bottom of this post was on Techcrunch this morning.  It shows Google’s acquisitions over the last nine years.  It is interesting for a number of reasons (not least size, (sub) sector, accelerating rate, and reason for acquiring) but I’m going to focus on geography.

I did a bit of analysis on the location of the last thirty acquisitions which takes us back to July 2007 which, yielded this pie chart.

The US bias is stark.  I am sure Google is aware of all the great innovation going on outside the US and will be looking to change this balance in favour of the rest of the world (indeed I know some of the people inside Google who are trying to make that happen), but this shows how much there is to do.  I’ve listed the companies by geography at the end of the post.

If anybody has any pointers I’d be interested to see comparable data for the other big tech acquirers, particularly in the internet space, and also for small internet acquisitions in the UK/Europe generally.

UPDATE: Ian Darroch just sent me some Cisco data he pulled together a few years ago.  Of the 106 acquisitions they made from 1993 to 2005 85% were in the US (90 out of 106).

Location of the last 30 deals

US – Jambool, Slide, Instantiations, Metaweb, ITA, Invite Media, Simplify Media, Global IP solutions, Bump Technologies, Agnilux, Episodic, Docverse, Picnik, Aardvark, Appjet, Teracent, Gizmo5, Admob, reCAPTCHA, On2, Omnisio, Postini, Image America

Israel – LabPixies,

UK – PlinkArt

Finland – Jaiku

South Korea – TNC

Unknownd – reMail (Y-Combinator company though, so probably US), Zingku