CEO of Vantage Towers Christian Hillabrant referred to his company's extensive activities and contribution to local digital telecommunications systems, during an interview to Athens-Macedonian News Agency (ANA-MPA) on the sidelines of the 10th Delphi Economic Forum.

Speaking to ANA-MPA journalist Nikos Drossos, Hillabrant explained that "Vantage Towers is a digital infrastructure company. We build, maintain, and own the telecommunication towers that carry the signal from operators like Vodafone and Nova from the cell tower to your handset. We're a five-year-old company. We operate across 10 countries with about 86,000 sites." 

As to the company's contribution in the local digital system, the company CEO underlined that in Greece "we have approximately 5,500 of those sites. We are the leading tower company here. We not only have telecom towers and rooftops, but we also have in-building systems, where we cover inside, as well as small cells that cover in the dense urban areas of Greece." 

Referring to the revenues that rank his company at the top of 200 companies in the sector, Hillabrant noted that "it is a very explosive growing business. For us, it's often... can we run faster and deliver more towers for our customers here. There's a huge demand for communications. It has changed the way that our lives are conducted, and no different than clean air, clean water to drink, a roof over your head and food - telecommunications is the lifeblood of the country."

Regarding how Vantage Towers is helping the digital innovation ecosystem in Greece, Hillabrant said, "One of our big focuses is looking at the digital divide that occurs today. So in the major metro areas, say in Athens or the suburbs, coverage is pretty good for all coverage areas. But as you go out to the rural areas, the underserved areas, this is a huge opportunity for companies like Vantage to play. What we do is we build a single tower, and then we provide a host for all the various companies that would have an interest here. And this is... not only mobile network operators but also IOT operators. We're doing projects here in Greece that are interesting around wildfire, early identification and communication to the public sector. So this is an area of huge growth for us and we hope to be able to bridge that digital divide by having cost-effective solutions." 

The Vantage Towers CEO was asked, based on his expertise in the field, how he sees Greek infrastructure, and how he would market it. In his response, he underlined that Greece is "definitely one of the stronger countries. If you look at our total tower count, I think it's third largest of all the countries in which we do business today. It's a growing and vibrant ecosystem. What we find is our customers continue to invest in order to provide coverage to those underserved areas. And then with the explosion of 5G traffic, it's a need to densify existing networks, to add capacity so that those experiences of mobile broadband are brought to life for all the customers of the MNOs (mobile network operators). 

Responding to a question on whether he had any staffing problems, and how he rated local talent, Hillabrant said,  "We have about 80 employees here, out of the 800 total employees that we employ as a company. What we find is very high-skilled labor that is available due to the top universities. And again, being part of telecommunication, there's very high demand for coming into industries like ours. So we find often when we post a job that we get a ton of responses of really well-qualified candidates. So we couldn't be happier operating here in Greece today. There is, and in fact we're looking at ways that we can... leverage Greek talent to maybe even support part of our other company."

Vantage Towers did run training programs, he said, but "think there's more that we need to do around employee development and training, but it's an area that we invest in heavily. One of the things that I think we'll start to see as an industry, as people get older and start to retire, is there's a need to bring young people in that have an interest in doing things like working on data centers, working on deployment of systems, and even climbing towers. That's an area of growth."

As for his partnership in Greece with Vodafone and Nova, he said he was very happy with it: "Amazing. Look, I have to pinch myself. We couldn't be more lucky. The sense that we are able to build not just for one but for two mobile network operators on every site that we build provides a very resilient network and it increases our ability to invest even more money, knowing that we're able to get two rents versus one. So it's a great partnership." 

Following up on his mention of the company's investment, and what the investment plans were for the coming years, he explained, "To put this in perspective, every year we spend somewhere between four to six hundred million in investment across the portfolio in the 10 countries I just mentioned. As an industry, we recognize that it will take somewhat in the neighborhood of about a hundred billion in investment, across the EU, to fully realize the 5G and eventually 6G outline goals as part of the EU focus on mobile communications." 

To a final question relating to the company's contribution to the environment and concerns expressed about health hazards related to mobile communications, Hillabrant responded, "I think most of those theories have been debunked in the name of science, that that's not the case. But from an ESG (environmental, social, and governance) perspective, one of the things we're focusing on is renewable energy. So we look at wind power, we look at solar power, ways of offsetting use on the traditional power grid. Greece is obviously the leader of that area, and this is something that we're investing very much in Greece."

(The interview may also be accessed online at https://youtu.be/wQNqTJ5ahSI)