With the message “Productivity: National Objective, Collective Responsibility” #Sev4Growth took place today, Tuesday, October 7, 2025, the open event of its General Assembly Sebat the Athens Concert Hall. The event was honored by the President of the Republic. Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis addressed speech.while the Chairman of the Board of Directors by Sev K. Spyros Theodoropoulos It presented the positions of the business community to improve productivity aimed at a more competitive economy and prosperous society. The main guest of the event was the president of the Federal Bank of Germany and a member of the European Central Bank General Council, Dr Joachim Nagel, who discussed with journalist Mr. Pavlos Tsima. In his opening position, Dr Nagel stressed: “What Greece has achieved in the last decade is not just a national story of success is a source of inspiration for the whole of Europe. They show that reforms, however difficult they are, perform. “

In his speech, the BSE president emphasized that the international environment is characterized by turmoil and unprecedented uncertainty, with the impact of commerce, energy and supply chains. At the same time, as he pointed out, Europe is lagging behind in growth, productivity and technological progress against countries such as the US, China and India, and a year after the Draghi report, only 11% of its proposals have progressed, showing the slow European response.

Within this environment, he stressed that Greece has achieved significant steps of progress and gradual convergence: steady growth at EU, conquering investment grade, decrease in tax evasion, drastic reduction in unemployment, increase wages and reduce tax rates for low and medium income. As he noted, “Greece has succeeded in operating as a normal country, a country that lives in accordance with its potential and does not burden future generations.”

The BSE president was particularly in the contribution of businesses, with industry cutting down, to the good run of the Greek economy. As he said, total exports of goods amounted to € 50 billion in 2024, equaling for another year the revenue from tourism and other exported services. The industry, a second largest employer in the country after trade, offers salaries by 35% higher than the average economy, while sectors such as food, medicines, metals, chemicals and shipping equipment are constantly expanding their presence in international markets. At the same time, it praised the contribution of other sectors to the country’s GDP, while stressing that the innovation ecosystem achieves significant growth, with 3,000 startups and a total valuation estimated between $ 8-12 billion for 2024.

He added, however, that critical lags remain in Europe such as the balance of the balance of goods, high energy costs and volatility, polynomial, bureaucracy and slow administration.

The central axis of the speech of the BSE president was the issue of low productivity. As he noted, Greece is at 54% of the EU average (with the industry at 75%), and has remained almost stagnant in the last 30 years. He particularly stood in the “big misunderstanding”, he said, “it has prevailed in a part of society that when we talk about growth growth, we mean increasing working hours or intensifying it.” While productivity, he explained, “is the creation of value added and is a matter of organization, technology, investment, institutional simplification, speed of justice, quality of education and training at all levels, functionality of infrastructure and stability of rules.” He noted that the main responsible for increasing productivity are not workers, but the state and businesses and addressed everyone to “to set a common goal of rapidly increasing productivity, every aspect and every activity of the public and private sectors, with annual landmarks, measurable ratios”.

Mr Theodoropoulos urged states and businesses in productive investment jumps, which he said would mean respectively of extroversion, technology and productive reconstruction and re -formulated his proposal for the institutionalization of overworks as a horizontal, investment incentive.

At the same time, it has set human resources as a critical priority, emphasizing the need for mass investment in technical and vocational education, training and reheating, adopting business intelligence by businesses and enhancing the inclusion in the labor market.

On the issue of energy costs, the BSE president reiterated that he remains a decisive factor in the competitiveness of the Greek economy. He stressed that Greece is still among the countries with the highest energy costs in the EU, which erodes the competitiveness of all sectors horizontally and negatively affects inflation. As he noted, for the industry – and especially for energy – access to competitive and predictable energy is a condition of survival. Finally, he expressed the expectation of the dialogue that has already begun between the state and BSE to soon lead to positive results to support domestic production.

In closing, he addressed a call for cooperation to “move on from the individual effort, to the collective” and “to achieve Greece’s transition from a” normal “country to a productive country.” In particular, it called on the state “to make productivity a basic criterion of all policies” and businesses “to intensify their investment effort, digitization, extroversion and investment in people”. Finally, he assured society that improving productivity is “the way for better jobs, higher wages, better social benefits and not a Trojan horse to intensify work”.