Mr. Constantinos Antonopoulos, President & CEO of “Inspiring Earth” was a guest speaker at Fortune Greece “CEO INITIATIVE FORUM 2024” on Nov 7th.

Speaking in the section “Present and Future of Greek Industry Through Geopolitical and Financial Uncertainties” he gave the audience some interesting food-for-thought:

· Currently, manufacturing is a very interesting industry and quite underrated. There are small businesses where a fund can offer transparency and reliability, so it becomes “bankable”. The whole effort is to build it, grow it and hand it over to the next generation of funds. So, we pick industries that currently have less favorable market position. For example, the agricultural sector. There is no more degraded sector in Greece than agriculture.

· There is a deficit of management skills. We need to convince people who live in the – so to speak – comfort of multinational corporations
to enter the concept of risk, to create value, because fund managers are paid based on success.

· Our politicians state that the flow of foreign direct investment is adequate. I believe it is not. The largest part of foreign investments is in real estate. Real estate is not productive. We rather need foreign productive investment. Greece’s big problem is not GDP. Greece’s problem is the trade balance. Greece is a “company” that loses money every year. Mr. Draghi points out that Europe needs yearly investments of 800 billion for the next 10 years. 800 billion in research, development, productive investments, etc, not in bricks.

Click here for a translated version of the article.