There are high-tech clusters in almost every country where there is a stable and developed economy. However, not every one of these locations justifies its existence and brings significant benefits to the state...
When people talk about places where many companies engaged in the production or development of high technologies are concentrated, California's Silicon Valley, which is considered the center of high technologies of the world, comes to everyone's mind. Locals call the place simply the Valley, since this agglomeration covers several areas of California.
For several years, the concept of Silicon Valley has become a household name, and the area where many high-tech companies are located is called so. Clusters located in other countries are often referred to as analogues of the Valley. Often they do not show such indicators as the California agglomeration, but outside the States and Europe there are analogues that are viable projects with great prospects.
Bangalore, India
About the cluster called Bangalore heard every person interested in IT-technologies. The city is home to more than half of the startups that are based in India. The publication "Business Insider" published data according to which the approximate estimate of the GDP of Bangalore exceeds $ 110 billion.
The main difference between Bangalore and Silicon Valley in the United States is that in the Indian version of the agglomeration there are several large companies, and in the Valley there are many small start-ups aimed at achieving a technological revolution in various fields. The Indian authorities located enterprises operating in important industries for the state on the territory of Bangalore, which ensured the scientific explosion. Many research centers, universities and colleges have opened in the city, applying high technologies in the educational process.
On the territory of the Indian cluster there are large companies engaged in the sale of air tickets, automakers, IT companies and branches owned by transnational corporations. Startups that appear in Bangalore are often later bought out by large businesses of international level. Walmart, for example, 4 years ago bought a 77% stake in the company that created the online store Flipkart. The value of the transaction is estimated at $ 16 billion.
A key feature of Bangalore is the high regulation in the field of law, inherent in all Indian business. For this reason, the invested money is often withdrawn from the country, but the place of the departed investors is almost immediately taken by others. The main reason why foreign companies invest in Bangalore is the mobile market, the growth of which is the fastest in history. India has overtaken China in terms of population, and more than one and a half billion Indians need to produce hundreds of millions of mobile phones, smartphones and tablets. Indians practically do not use computers, because in the era of their popularity, the country was not sufficiently developed. Using smartphones to access the Internet, the population of India may not even imagine that before the whole world went online from personal computers or laptops!
Every year, tens of billions of dollars are invested in Bangalore from various foreign companies and funds - Tiger Global Management, Accel Partners, Kalaari Capital, DST Global, Nexus Venture Partners and others. Startups opened in Bangalore often grow up and start selling shares on international stock exchanges. One such corporation is Infosys, an IT corporation that was already worth more than $11 billion in 2018.
Zhongguancun, China
Previously, the name Zhongguancun was borne by the street of Beijing, where the capital's universities were located. At the end of the last century, the first companies in China began to appear on the street, owned not by the state and the Communist Party, but by individuals who were engaged in the study and creation of electronic technologies. In 1988, Zhongguancun became the first region of the city and the country to master technology and science at the state level.
Now the area has grown to several parks, the area of which exceeds 500 square kilometers. Almost the entire technological potential of the Celestial Empire is concentrated here. University Street has become a small part of a huge cluster with a huge impact on the world of technology. In the Zhongguancun district, there are more than 10 thousand high-tech companies: Lenovo, Sohu, Xiaomi, Baidu Founder Group and others. In the neighborhood with them work employees of branches of international high-tech corporations, for example, Microsoft, IBM or Intel. About 200 research centers and 40 universities are open in the district.
The main problem of the Chinese Silicon Valley is the lack of foreign specialists - only 10 thousand employees from other countries work here. In the American cluster, more than a third of the population are foreign professionals. To attract the attention of investors and personnel from abroad, the Chinese government facilitates the taxation and visa regime for them, pays record salaries to employees from abroad who settled in Zhongguancun.
The capitalization of companies in this area has already approached $ 1 trillion, and the largest corporations, for example, Lenovo, earn almost $ 400 million per year and have a turnover of $ 45 billion.
Silicon Wadi, Israel
Residents of Israel are called the people who give birth to start-ups. Such a name appeared among Israelis after an economic miracle began in the country.
In 2017, more than 6 thousand companies working in the field of high technologies were registered in Israel, and the country itself is considered the place where the highest concentration of startups in the world is. Every year, more than 1300 new startups appear in Israel, and they are concentrated on the territory of the Israeli Silicon Valley.
The area of Silicon Wadi occupies most of the state and began to form in the second half of the twentieth century. The country began to develop its own weapons since France imposed an embargo on Israel in 1967. The development of domestic weapons gave impetus to the development of the local Valley. Later, arms firms began to produce civilian products, and by the end of the century, software creators began to appear in the country. In the 1990s, Israel opened up to foreign business and investment, and now the state has branches of all the largest technology companies that exist in the world.
