@Sharky: It looks like you don't know the markets or how they work. You see, when you look at the markets/market share, you are dissing the fact, that the markets work only on local level.
For example McDonalds, it currently the second biggest hamburger chain in Finland, and propably ends up being third in the next couple of years. And i don't think things are different in different countries. You see, McDonalds doesn't really have global competitor, but where the competition is, it's not winning (in terms of market share).
The same goes for movies and music, in the local markets, they are losing to their local competitors. In movies and music, most of them are targeted to local markets, although some do aim for international success. Most popular artists, for example, in Finland tend to be finnish. Of course, there are some bands with some international success, like Darude, HIM, Nightwish, Lordi, but they all have targeted for the local, finnish, market. Basically you could say that if you make a movie or record with your (non-english) native language, it's not going to be a hit outside your own country. Although, Rammstein makes a good example about exception (but german is a lot better language than english for heavy metal). Also worth of noticing is that, after an artist have become success in it's own country, they start to market the artist abroad (if the record company sees it worth marketing), when it's easy to become a success in USA, which has the biggest single market and record company makes the money needed to market the artist abroad, before they start the marketing. And there are only two kinds of record companies (in general), either wery small, who can't afford multi-million marketing budget worldwide and the extremely big companies, who like to market only the artists who preferrably already have success.
And about cars, currently the USAn manufacturers are making (in USA) propably the lowest quality cars in market. The reason for example BMW has a niche market, is because they choose to have it. You're not going to hit mass market by making premium cars, with premium quality and sell them at premium price. BMW is doing fine with the way they have chose. The same thing cannot be said about the USAn manufacturers, who wrestle with profitability issues. This is one of the issues why they buy most of the parts from Korea and then assemble them in USA.
As you propably have noticed, the USAn manufacturers aren't really pushing their USAn branded cars in Europe or their European branded cars in USA. Although, they are slowly trying to change it. Chrysler tried to enter the European market with Neon, which was really crappy car, with it's bad quality, impractical space usage and underpowered engine with 3-speed automatic transmission, which made the car feel even more underpowered. These qualities may sell cars in the US, but in Europe they are unacceptable when competitors offer cars with better space usage, better quality, and better performance with lower fuel consumption. GM is currently trying to hit the market with Dodge Caliber, it has low pricepoint, decent variety of engines (it has even diesel engines), aggressive look (it has "fun" factor) and it's assembled in Sweden, if i recall.
The reasons why USAn branded cars aren't popular in Europe, are because their low quality, high price, they are bad to drive, they are impractical, have low performance, high consumption and they don't have (at least decent) diesel engines on their models. Actually only decent diesel engine outside Europe, has Toyota, while even it has a long way to go to match for example Volkswagen, PSA or Renault.
10% market share for european manufacturers seem a little low, considering Europe having 6 car manufacturers, USA having 3, Japan having 2, China having 2, India having 1, Russia having one and Korea having 1.
One good example how the USAn companies seems to see how they enter Europe, is Wal-Mart. They use "elbowing" in USA, so they thougt it would work in Europe too. But, they faced two problems and created one of their own. Problem one was their tactic in USA didn't work in Europe because of the laws around here. Problem 2 was Lidl, so they entered the red ocean and Lidl already "elbowed" as much as was possible. Then the problem they created, was using USAn suppliers, which caused them to have too expensive products. Although we're not as patriotic as USAns are, but we like to buy familiar products and "Made in USA" doesn't stand for quality. And even less when you provide the cheapest and lowest quality products here.
i-pod propably is the market leader in MP3 players, but the most common MP3 player still is Nokian mobile. I mean, is there any mobile phone today, which doesn't have MP3 player.
Among the internet related companies, the USAn companies definately are the most popular, but that has a lot to do with their headstart, they had time to establish their services, while everyone else were just starting to get familiar with internet. But on the other hand, there's services like Skype (which atleast originates from a swede). Now this doesn't mean, that there would be a threat to the US companies dominating the market, but it can be considered as a sign, that others are following and eventually put up competition.
In general, the reason for USAn companies foothold in Europe, originates a lot from WW2, when a lot of the infrastructure was destroyed, people became poor and things were messed up. After WW2, there were a lot of cheap companies, which needed capital to get up on their feets and start working. Since USA had money and investors, the USAn investors gave the money and the companies gave a nice share to investors.
So we don't hate USAns or their products, we just know that we and the Japanese have better products.
