Multinationals flow to Greece
Multinational companies, technology giants and foreign startups are descending on Greece, helping it reverse the brain drain of the 2010s.
According to the International Institute for Management Development (IMD) and its World Digital Competitiveness Ranking for 63 countries, two factors that make the Greek economy attractive are the skilled human resources and the high level of education.
“When I left to study in Edinburgh, I never imagined a company like the one I work for would come to Ioannina,” admits 38-year-old Giorgos Karagiannis, a developer and one of the managers of the high-tech company P&I Hellas in the the northern city. Wanting to stay close to his family and work in the city where he grew up, he returned in 2017 from Britain. “There is progress in the company, the benefits are very good and the wages are close to German wages. We have built our own culture within the company,” he says.
A few days ago Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced 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.
Research published last year by Endeavor Greece estimates that 138 foreign companies have established technology hubs in this country, of which 73 are multinationals employing over 8,000 people in technology positions. The remaining 65 belong to the category of startups or scale-ups, employing approximately 650 workers.
Thessaloniki has been a magnet for investments in recent years, seeking to transform into a hub of technology and innovation. It hosts the new IT and software center of Deutsche Telekom, following the creation of the digital innovation center of pharmaceutical company Pfizer. Also US technology group Cisco founded in 2020 its international center for digital transformation and digital, while Deloitte founded the Deloitte Alexander Competence Center (DACC) in 2017. Consulting company Accenture has also created an innovation hub in Thessaloniki.
In Athens, banking giant JP Morgan has created a Payments Innovation Lab, while some acquisitions of startups have begun to leave their mark: Facebook’s parent company Meta acquired Accusonus, utilizing the potential of its Patra resources, while recently agritech company Augmenta was acquired by CΝH Industrial.
