Evangelos Mytilineos, chief executive of Metlen Energy and Metals, issued a wide-ranging set of warnings and disclosures at a conference in Athens on Tuesday, touching on Greek political stability, the failures of European energy policy, and a landmark Greek investment in gallium production that he said has undercut Chinese competitors on cost.
Mytilineos spoke at a conference titled “National Action Plan Under Conditions of Global Uncertainty,” organized by Kyklos Ideon, a think tank founded by former Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos, and the Delphi Economic Forum.
Politics first
On the domestic political outlook, Mytilineos was blunt. “Greece is currently at a real crossroads of defense and geopolitical upheaval,” he said, adding that political instability was “a very great luxury” the country could not afford. With the ruling New Democracy party short of an outright parliamentary majority, he called on all political forces to set aside what he called toxicity and focus on workable governance. “I do not see any willingness to cooperate,” he said, “hence the risk of ungovernability.” He warned that “governmental stability is number one” necessity from a business perspective, and that prolonged political instability would have a severely adverse effect on the country.
Energy costs eating industry alive
Turning to energy, Mytilineos trained his fire on Brussels. “Expensive energy eats the guts of the economy,” he said. “From morning to night. This is happening in Europe. It has been happening for a long time and by all indications it will continue for some time to come.”
He argued that the EU’s decision to halt Russian natural gas imports had imposed major costs on industry with no compensatory support from European institutions. When industry asked Brussels how it would help companies absorb the impact, he said, the answer was “zero. There is nothing.”
On renewables, he was equally pointed. The political drive toward decarbonization, he said, had cost enormous sums, had not delivered the expected results, and had not translated into lower bills for households or for heavy industry.
He also raised a specific concern about the Greek solar buildout that has turned the country into a net energy exporter. The CEO of Metlen warned that this “success story” carries a hidden danger. Midday overproduction saturates the domestic grid, forcing exports at zero market prices. With no revenue during peak production hours, many solar investors cannot service the loans they took out to finance their installations. ‘We will slowly start to see the banks take them over,’ he warned, calling this the next generation of non-performing loans.
The gallium play
The most closely watched disclosure concerned Metlen’s investment in gallium production at Agios Nikolaos in the regional unit of Viotia, central Greece, with a total outlay of 300 million euros. Gallium is a critical metal used in semiconductors, defense systems and advanced electronics, and China currently controls as much as 99 percent of global supply in some categories.
Mytilineos said Metlen had spent years in research and development to reach this point, and that the project had achieved something the industry had long considered out of reach: a production cost below that of Chinese producers. “Their great weapon was always low cost and the threat that at any moment they would open the floodgates and flood the market,” he said. “With that threat, nobody dared get involved. The way we approached this has a cost of roughly half that of the Chinese. So we are not afraid.”
Trial production has already begun, he said, with output set to scale up through the coming years and reach full capacity in 2029. First commercial agreements, he added, would be announced shortly. Demand is coming primarily from the United States, Europe, Japan and South Korea.
Commenting on the broader geopolitical backdrop, Mytilineos noted that rare earths and critical minerals had featured in the recent Trump-Xi summit, but expressed frustration at the EU’s pace. Two years after Brussels identified 34 critical raw materials as strategic priorities, he said, “the answer is nothing. Copper, aluminum, these are essential and very necessary metals. Nobody knows what is going to happen.”
Source: ot.gr
