They are making a “landing” in Greece multinationals, technology giants but also foreign start-ups help the country to win the difficult bet of returning the talent that went abroad during the years of crisis. The question, of course, is why would they choose it? According to the IMD, which measures the competitiveness index of 63 countries, two main factors that make the Greek economy attractive are the specialized human resources just like him high educational level. It is about the national talent that our country produces and that foreign companies find in large quantity and at a lower cost than in other countries. However, if we exclude large companies, mainly from the technology sector, which offer competitive wages to workers, the economic compensation of workers in Greece remains low compared to other EU countries, which shows that the bet of brain augmentation It is late and the country is going to win very hard.
“When I went to study in Edinburgh I never imagined that he would come to Janina a company like the one I work for now”, admits to “K”, the 38-year-old from Ioannina Jorge Karagiannis, developer and one of the managers of the high-tech company P&I Hellas in Ioannina. Wanting to stay close to his family and work in the town where he grew up, he returned from England in 2017. “There is progress in the company, the benefits are very good and the salaries are close to German salaries. We have built our own culture within the company,” he says.
Mr. Karagiannis graduated from the IT department of the University of Ioannina in 2009, while a few months later he started working for a small IT company in Ioannina, receiving only 630 euros per month. In September 2015, in the “heart” of capital controls, he went to Edinburgh for a postgraduate degree, taking some cash out of the ATM, and then worked in Newcastle for about a year. “I wanted to go back to Greece, but not work for a Greek companyI didn’t want to work for a company that was an introvert. As soon as I saw the P&I advertisement at the University of Ioannina liaison department, I sent my CV, spoke to the person in charge and was one of the first to be hired in 2017. On Friday I was working for the public investment bank of England and on Monday I was in P&I,” he says.
Ioannina has firmly entered the research and technology “map” in recent years, with TeamViewer and the German e-commerce company, among others, operating there. bestsecret, developing technology centers. “The IT sector in Greece is becoming a very important sector for employment and in general for the Greek economy. The brain drain has been largely reversed, people are hired from an early stage, while salaries in large companies in the sector are very competitive,” says Mr. Karagianni’s colleague and software engineer at P&I, Apostolos Voglis.
However, the search for construction facilities is a problem for technology companies, such as PI, which employs about 155 people and has at least 20 open jobs. “We are looking for a building to house our team, as the progress of the construction of the high-tech park by the Epirus Region is delayed. The plan was to move there,” says Mr. Karagiannis. In Ioannina, he is recently active with an innovation center and the PwC which has already begun recruiting to implement its digital projects.
Meanwhile, just a few days ago the Hewlett Packard Company announced that it is establishing an artificial intelligence research and development center in Athens, hiring engineers to work on the company’s technologies, such as HPE Ezmeral Software. The center operates with 30 engineers, while HPE executives with their LinkedIn posts give the impression that it was founded through the takeover of the team that the Greek startup maintained in Greece. arrikto, company of Konstantinos Venetsanopoulos. Research published last year by Endeavor Greece calculates how 138 foreign companies have established technological hubs in our country, of which 73 are multinationals employing more than 8,000 people in technology positions. The remaining 65 belong to the category of Opening or companies in an advanced state of development (scaleups), employing approximately 650 workers.
It has been a magnet for investment in recent years and Thessaloniki seeking to become a technology and innovation hub. The group’s new IT and software center is located on Karolou Dill Street in Thessaloniki Deutsche Telekomwhile a few years earlier, it was preceded by the creation of the digital innovation center (CDI) of the pharmaceutical industry Pfizer, which is estimated to support a total of 8,100 jobs across the spectrum of the Greek economy for the period 2020-2030, according to IOBE research. Likewise, the US technology group cisco founded in June 2020 the international center for digital transformation and digital skills in Thessaloniki, an investment of more than 10 million euros, while the Deloitte, founded in 2017, the Deloitte Alexander Competence Center (DACC). The latter is a center for knowledge creation, training and productivity and is located in the Thessaloniki Technology Park (Technopolis). The consultancy has also created an innovation center in Thessaloniki Accent.
In Athens, the banking giant JP Morgan proceeded to create a Payments Innovation Lab, that is, a Research and Development center for technologies related to payment systems, while at the same time some acquisitions of emerging companies have begun to make their mark. Facebook parent company Meta has acquired its parent company Accusonususing the potential it maintains in Patras, while the agrotechnology company Augmenta was recently acquired by CΝH Industrial, seeking to further strengthen the Research and Development center it maintains in Metamorfosi.
⇒ Today’s news
Follow kathimerini.gr on Google News and be the first to know all the news
See all the latest news from Greece and the world, at kathimerini.gr