Making a “landing” in Greece multinational companies, technology giants, as well as foreign startups helping the country win a difficult bet on the return of talents who went abroad during the crisis years. The question is, of course, why would they choose her? According to the IMD, which measures the Competitiveness Index of 63 countries, the two main factors that make the Greek economy attractive are: specialized human resources as good as high educational level. We are talking about domestic talent that our country produces, and foreign companies are found in large numbers and at a lower price compared to other countries. However, if we exclude large companies, mainly from the technology sector, which provide workers with competitive wages, the financial remuneration of workers in Greece is still low compared to other EU countries, which shows that the rate brain growth it’s too late and the country will win very hard.

“When I went to study in Edinburgh, I could not have imagined that he would come to Yanina such a company in which I now work,” admits “K”, a 38-year-old resident of Ioannina. George 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 city where he grew up, he returned in 2017 from England. “There is progress in the company, the benefits are very good, and the salary is close to German. We have built our own culture within the company,” he says.

Mr. Karagiannis graduated from the Faculty of IT at the University of Ioannina in 2009 and a few months later started working for a small IT company in Ioannina, earning only 630 euros per month. In September 2015, at the heart of capital controls, he left for Edinburgh to complete his master’s degree, taking some cash from an ATM and then working 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 introverted. As soon as I saw the P&I advertisement in the public relations department of the University of Ioannina, I sent my resume, spoke to the person in charge and was one of the first hired in 2017. On Friday, I worked at a government investment bank. England, and on Monday I was at P&I,” he says.

Janina has been firmly on the research and technology map in recent years, with TeamViewer and a German e-commerce company operating there, among others. BestSecret, development of 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 pretty much stopped, people are being hired from the start, and salaries are very competitive at big companies in the industry,” says Mr. Karagianni’s colleague and software engineer at P&I, Apostolos Voglis.

However, finding properties to build is a challenge for technology companies such as PI, which employs about 155 people and has at least 20 open vacancies. “We are looking for a building to house our team, given that the construction of a high-tech park by the Epirus region is delayed. The plan was to move there,” says Mr. Karagiannis. An innovation center has recently opened in Ioannina and PVC which has already begun recruiting employees for the implementation of its digital projects.

Meanwhile, just a few days ago Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced the creation of an artificial intelligence R&D center in Athens, hiring engineers to work on the company’s technologies such as HPE Ezmeral Software. The center employs 30 engineers, while HPE executives, with their LinkedIn posts, give the impression that it was founded by acquiring a team that a Greek startup maintained in Greece. Arricto, the company of Konstantinos Venetsanopoulos. A study published last year by Endeavor Greece calculates how 138 foreign companies created technological centers in our country, of which 73 multinational more than 8,000 people work in technical positions. The remaining 65 are categorized startups or companies in advanced stages of development (scaling) with about 650 employees.

In recent years it has been a magnet for investment and Thessaloniki aims to become a center of technology and innovation. The group’s new information technology and software center is located on Karolou Dill Street in Thessaloniki. Deutsche Telecomwhereas a few years before it was preceded by the establishment of a Digital Innovation Center (DIC) for the pharmaceutical industry pfizer, which IOBE estimates will provide a total of 8,100 jobs across the spectrum of the Greek economy over the period 2020-2030. In addition, the American technology group Cisco founded in June 2020 the international center for digital transformation and digital skills in Thessaloniki, an investment of over 10 million euros, while Deloitte, founded in 2017, Deloitte Alexander Competence Center (DACC). The latter is a center for know-how creation, training and performance improvement and is located in the Thessaloniki Technological Park (Technopolis). The consulting company has also set up an innovation center in Thessaloniki. Accenture.

In Athens, the banking giant JP Morgan launched the Payments Innovation Lab, i.e. the Center for Research and Development of technologies related to payment systems, at the same time, some start-up acquisitions began to make their mark. Facebook parent company Meta acquires parent company Accusonusleveraging the potential it maintains in Patras, and recently the agritech company Augmenta was acquired by CΝH Industrial to further strengthen the R&D center it maintains in Metamorfosi.