The banking group Société Générale announced on Friday that it had signed a contract for 745 million euros to sell its shares in Société Générale Maroc to the Moroccan holding company Saham.
Saham would thus take over all of the activities operated by Socit Générale Maroc as well as those of the insurance company La Marocaine Vie, which Socit Générale held via its insurance subsidiary Sogecap, management indicated in a press release.
All employees will also be taken over by Saham, an empire of insurance, offshoring (relocation) and finance in the Maghreb and Africa, founded by the former Moroccan Minister of Industry, billionaire Moulay Hafid Elalamy.
We are convinced that the quality of the takeover project by the Saham group will offer new prospects for the development of these activities and will create value for customers and employees, said the general director of the Socit Generale group Slawomir Krupa in a press release.
The bank with the red and black logo has already started to withdraw from Africa. In December and January, it sold two of its subsidiaries in Congo and Chad, and is in the process of executing sales of its subsidiaries in Equatorial Guinea and Burkina Faso.
The Socit Générale group, which has a long-standing presence in Africa, intends through these sales to shape a simplified, more synergetic and efficient model.
It joins a movement initiated by other banking groups, such as Barclays or BNP Paribas, which had sold several of their African subsidiaries in recent years.
The strategy of simplification of the business portfolio is part of the strategic roadmap of Socit Générale, whose net profit jumped to 2.5 billion euros in 2023. On Thursday, it announced that it had signed a sale protocol to the group bank BPCE of its capital goods financing activities for companies grouped in SGEF, for an amount of 1.1 billion euros.