Among the Saades, restraint and discretion are cultivated. So there will be no hoopla or champagne galore to celebrate the biggest acquisition in the history of CMA CGM, if it is finalized by the end of the year. The period for reviewing the accounts is coming to an end, and the shipowner must submit a binding purchase offer around May 8. But the Franco-Lebanese family, owner of the world’s third-largest container ship owner, would be very proud to see Bolloré Transport & Logistics fall into its hands, with its establishments in a good hundred countries and a turnover of 7 .1 billion euros. The CEO of the Marseille giant, Rodolphe Saadé, must sign a check for around 5 billion for this.
This will be the last operation to date for a multinational which has been chaining them since 2020, the year of its return to better fortune, after a difficult decade. And even just fortune: CMA CGM has made 44.6 billion dollars (40 billion euros) in profits over the last three years (2020-2022), thanks to the surge in freight rates during the two years when the spot price for transporting a “box” from China to Europe was multiplied by ten to reach 15,000 dollars. In the history of French capitalism, no company has developed so quickly.
This financial windfall would have inspired Jacques Saadé, founding patriarch who died in 2018, who wrote the first part of the history of CMA CGM. Fleeing Lebanon at war with a wife and children, he had created, in Marseilles, in 1978, the Compagnie maritime d’affrètement (CMA), which at the beginning only operated a ship between the Marseilles city and Beirut.
Ten years earlier, in the United States, he had become aware of the interest of the container, used to supply the American army in Vietnam. Before others, he saw China awaken and opened his first office in Shanghai in 1992. He took over the Compagnie Générale Maritime (CGM) from the State in 1996 for a pittance (20 million francs), with the discreet support from the President of the Republic Jacques Chirac, then bought the shipowner Delmas from Vincent Bolloré (already), in 2006, in exchange for a long-term agreement in the handling of African ports left to the Breton entrepreneur.
On the verge of sinking in 2009
He increases his fleet until he accumulates a debt that pushes him to the brink of shipwreck in 2009, when maritime traffic collapses following the financial crisis. The father did not always have the means for sometimes disproportionate ambitions. The heir disposes of it, and he has free rein. The company, which is not listed on the stock exchange, has only three shareholders: the Saadé family (73%), the Turkish conglomerate Yildirim Holding (24%) and the public bank Bpifrance (3%), traces of its rescue by the State during the dark years 2009-2012.
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