The ceremony of laying the first stone was intended above all to be symbolic. Tuesday 1er March, Rodolphe Saadé, Chairman and CEO of the CMA CGM group, officially lifted the veil on Tangram, while work was already very advanced. “centre of innovation and training” that the shipping and logistics giant will open in Marseille in September 2023.
Entrusted to the architect Jean-Michel Wilmotte, who came to present his project, the site extends over 6,000 square meters and faces the sea, at the foot of the hills of the Calanques National Park. He settled in the Pointe-Rouge district (8and), on a plot adjacent to the National Maritime School, where officers of the merchant navy are trained. A school with which the shipowner intends to further strengthen its natural ties.
Mr. Saadé has long toyed with the idea of creating an academy capable of providing both continuous training for the 120,000 employees of his group in the face of changes in very specific professions and of supporting research and innovation for, says -he, “building the sustainable transport and logistics of tomorrow”. The strong growth in the company’s profits in 2020 and 2021 – 5.6 billion dollars (5 billion euros) for the third quarter of 2021 alone, the last official figure – gives it the means to achieve this ambition. For Tangram, the investment, which CMA CGM qualifies as “ strategic “, would be around 24 million euros.
In the presence of the minister delegate in charge of transport Jean-Baptiste Djebbari, and the mayor of Marseille, Benoît Payan (PS), Rodolphe Saadé, who never fails to recall his attraction for innovation, presented the academy as the tool supposed to allow its employees “ to respond to the major challenges ahead”. Three hundred people will be able to work daily on the site, which will house three navigation simulators, an auditorium, an audiovisual recording studio, some twenty classrooms and three war rooms intended for crisis simulations. Two rooms lined with screen walls will provide distance training in the sixty countries where the group is present. An idea that emerged during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Dual function
However, Tangram also pursues a goal with more blurred contours: to become a “center of exchange and creation with international influence”. The place is thus designed to accommodate in residence, or on an ad hoc basis, researchers seconded from international centers and universities, start-up entrepreneurs, representatives of partner companies, even competitors, and allow them to dialogue with CMA CGM experts and employees.
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