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Mr. Constantinos Antonopoulos is a founding member, an executive and a shareholder of INTRALOT.
Since 1992, the year when the company was established,
he has held his current position of Chief Executive Officer.
He is the Chairman of many companies of the INTRALOT Group
and a non-executive Member of the Board of Directors of INTRACOM Holdings.
He started his career in major Greek industrial units,
such as the Hellenic and the Elefsis Shipyards,
and has held significant positions in the Ministry of Finance and in the Ministry of Industry.
In 1989 he moved to INTRACOM,
one of the leading high-tech companies in Southeastern Europe.
Mr. Constantinos Antonopoulos has been honored with numerous distinctions.
He has been inducted into the "Lottery industry Hall of Fame", as one of the most important professionals in the world lottery industry,
he was awarded "Manager of the Year 2004",
"Best Innovative Manager" and "Best Global Oriented Manager" of the year 2005
and "Best Manager FTSE/ASE 20" for 2006.
It was his remarkable initiative to make INTRALOT a founding member of the Global Growth Companies community,
the "New Champions" of the World Economic Forum (WEF).
As an active member of the business community,
he is involved in a number of chambers and associations.
He has been elected to the Board of Directors of the Federation of Greek Industries
and he is a member of Foreign Affairs Executive Committee of the Federation (SEV International).
He is the President of the Greek-Latin American Business Council and the Hellenic-Vietnamese Business Council.
He was elected Vice-president of the Greek-Serbian Business Council
and is a member of the Board of Directors of the Greek-Turkish Business Council, among others.
He was born in the city of Patras,
he graduated in 1976 from the National Technical University of Athens with a degree in Electrical Engineering.
He continued his studies at the University of Manchester (UMIST), England,
and received a Master of Science (M.Sc.) degree in Systems Reliability.
He is married and is a father of three children.
I would like to ask Mr. Antonopoulos to step up to the podium.
I hope I do not look like one of those people at the Oscars...
First of all, it is a very great honor for me to receive this award, and to receive it from your equally honorable institution.
I would like to start by thanking the Hellenic Management Association, its President and the selection committee for their trust and their vote.
It is really a great honor for me
and I want to congratulate this institution, which promotes and supports excellence for the past 12 years.
I would like to share a few words with you.
If one of you were to ask me which word can define my professional career
I would use just one word, the word "extroversion".
It is a word that describes out times.
This word did not always have the attention of public policy and the business world in the past...
but what you see today, what we succeeded, as individuals and as a company...
it took a long time to build.
Extroversion is a word and is an idea which I have experienced
because extroversion places itself as a need for companies and for governments.
Indeed, it is a real need because no single country or single market is able to meet the potential needs of entrepreneurs and of enterprises.
What I want to emphasize is that extroversion is a way of life for a manager.
Whoever does not realize this cannot fulfill the needs and the requirements of his role.
In everyday life, extroversion means to be comfortable with flying for 20 and 30 hours on a plane.
Extroversion means to be interested in what the Central Banker of Argentina has to say about the monetary policy of the country.
Extroversion means to follow sports news on the internet, on ESPN,
in order to see playoffs in basketball and the NBA, so that you can talk about it with your U.S. customers.
All this is a way of life, a lifestyle, and if you do not like it, you cannot go further.
I think what we have achieved, as individuals and as a company, is a reflection of our company's path.
As the President said, we started 22 years ago, in 1992 with 10 people
and today we have 5700 people.
Our path has to do with extroversion, not only as individuals but also as our company's strategy.
Innovation, the first thing we did was innovation, which is one of the pillars that the Hellenic Management Association supports. Innovation.
Without a product you cannot compete abroad. Nothing is for granted.
In the international environment, the ease of globalization
offers the opportunity for any small, medium or large business to compete and succeed, as long as it deserves it.
That is the major benefit of globalization.
Moreover, today's modern technology gives us access to information through the internet and mobile telephony.
It gives us constant access to our company and partners daily. And access to our family.
Because an important factor, as I mentioned earlier about this way of life, is that we forgo time with our family.
So, cell phones give us a chance to become "better dads".
The path that we followed all these years is in itself a good and interesting path.
I would like to thank three groups of people who supported me throughout this journey.
First, I would like to thank my family for their strength in my absence.
And on the other hand I should also confess that I'm glad my kids are becoming "citizens of the world".
They are children who have outgrown national boundaries and are extrovert by birth, so to speak.
The second group I would like to thank is our company's employees and executives
because entrepreneurship and management is about teamwork.
I think that they deserve "Congratulations" because this award is also recognition of their role and contribution as well.
Finally I would like to thank our shareholders
because what we simply call "trust", is a major asset when you operate in the international environment.
You must have real confidence in the manager of an extrovert company or an international group,
who has to actually operate as a businessman and entrepreneur, which means he has to take constant risks.
And we took big risks. What we have achieved today is not only a result of work and innovation,
it involved risks that we wouldn't be able to take without the trust and support of the shareholders of the company.
So these are the people that I would like to thank:
my family, the employees and the shareholders,
and also all of you who are present today in this honorable event.
Thank you very much.