Christos Harpantidis

Christos Harpantidis is the Vice President of Philip Morris International for the South-East Europe, responsible for 12 countries (Greece, Cyprus, Malta, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Albania & Kosovo, North Macedonia, Bosnia Herzegovina & Montenegro, Croatia and Slovenia).

Born in Thessaloniki in 1970, Christos studied Physics at the Aristotle University while he continued his studies in the United Kingdom getting his Master’s degree in Economics (MA) and Business Administration (MBA) from Kent University. Christos has also completed executive education programs at Stanford and Duke Universities.

His started his career in 1997, as Marketing & Sales Trainee at Coca-Cola Hellenic.

In 2003, Christos became a member of Papastratos’ family, taking on responsibility of key positions in the company’s commercial department in Greece and abroad. From 2012 to 2015, he was based at the Philip Morris International Operations Center in Lausanne, Switzerland, holding senior management positions in the Sales Strategy department and then in the Commercialization of New Generation Products.

In August 2015, Christos was assigned to the position of Chairman and Managing Director of Papastratos and Head of the EU South East Cluster (Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Croatia, Cyprus, Malta) of Philip Morris International.

In 2017, with a vision of a smoke-free future, he led a € 300 million investment that turned Papastratos’ facilities into one of the few production and export centers of PMI’s innovative tobacco products achieving to transform Greece’s leading tobacco industry to a world-leading technology company. In 2022, under his leadership, a more than € 550 million investment has been completed in Papastratos’ facilities in Aspropyrgos.