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Europe says it wants larger companies capable of competing with American and Asian giants. Its leaders call for deeper integration, more investment and new “European champions”. Yet scale cannot be created by declarations or a common incorporation regime alone. In practice, it requires mergers across national borders - and dealmakers willing to push through the political resistance those mergers provoke.

Europe’s scale paradox

The continent’s problem is clearest in industries where fragmentation weakens investment. Europe has about 40 telecoms companies with more than half a million customers, compared with eight in America. American operators earn roughly three times as much revenue per customer and spend far more on infrastructure. Banking, energy and retail display similar tensions: governments endorse consolidation in principle but often defend national firms when a foreign European buyer appears.

This contradiction makes three unusually persistent figures important to Europe’s economic future. Andrea Orcel, Xavier Niel and Daniel Kretinsky differ in background and method, but each is assembling influence across borders in sectors where Europe badly needs greater scale.

Three ways to consolidate a continent

Orcel, chief executive of Italy’s UniCredit, is trying to build a genuinely continental banking group. UniCredit now controls just under half of the voting rights in Germany’s Commerzbank, despite fierce objections from the bank’s managers, trade unions and successive German chancellors. The stake is not yet enough to force a merger, but it exposes the gap between Germany’s support for European integration and its hostility when integration threatens a domestic institution. Orcel is simultaneously navigating Italy’s tangled struggle over Monte dei Paschi di Siena and insurer Generali, where family holdings and state intervention complicate ordinary corporate logic.

Niel is an entrepreneur turned consolidator. He built his fortune by bringing low-cost internet access to France, then accumulated telecom interests in Italy, Sweden, Ireland, Ukraine and elsewhere. His companies have pursued Vodafone, Telecom Italia and SFR, often through structures as complicated as the industry they seek to simplify. His strategy addresses a genuine economic weakness: Europe needs fewer, stronger operators that can finance modern networks. But every proposed combination encounters national politics, incumbent interests or the wreckage left by earlier debt-fuelled deals.

Kretinsky resembles a one-man investment fund. He first bought unfashionable coal and power assets, then expanded into retailers such as Casino, Metro and Sainsbury’s, along with stakes in steel, oil, media, football and Britain’s Royal Mail. His portfolio is less coherent than those of Orcel or Niel, yet it shows how much value can be unlocked by an investor willing to enter businesses that governments, families or previous owners can no longer manage comfortably.

A test of Europe’s ambitions

None of the three acts from public spirit, and their growing power deserves scrutiny. Still, Europe needs people capable of moving capital and control across borders. Orcel’s fight in Germany tests whether the continent truly wants a European financial system rather than a collection of protected national ones. Niel’s telecom holdings and Kretinsky’s energy assets bear directly on the infrastructure Europe needs to remain competitive.

Their prominence carries a less flattering message as well. If the same three men appear in nearly every major corporate drama, that may reflect exceptional dynamism - or an economy with too few firms, investors and entrepreneurs able to reshape declining industries. Europe’s challenge is therefore not simply to tolerate ambitious dealmakers. It is to create a market deep enough that cross-border consolidation becomes routine rather than a political spectacle driven by a tiny committee of buyers.