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Portrait of billionaire Rodolphe Saadé: this 52-year-old Franco-Lebanese has been at the head of the French maritime freight giant CMA CGM for five years, which has experienced record profits since 2021.
The Marseille-based shipowner has made nearly $28 billion in net profits since the start of the year. This is a little more than in 2021, and he intends to take the opportunity to expand. Rodolphe Saadé spoke recently on France Inter: ” We are in transport and logistics, for example the sneakers you are wearing probably come from Asia and are transported by container ships and hopefully on board CMA CGM ships. So that is shipping. We are also invested in logistics. What is important to me is that today the CMA CGM group is made up of 150,000 highly valuable employees who are present in 160 countries and I am counting a lot on them to continue to develop. So as long as I can afford it, I will continue. »
Rodolphe Saadé took over the CMA CGM in 2017, a year before the death of his father Jacques Saadé. This Lebanese of Syrian origin had fled the civil war in Lebanon in 1978 to settle in Marseille. At the beginning, it had only one boat and four employees, then developed thanks to international exchanges, in particular towards China. 44 years later, the French group is third in the world for maritime freight behind the Italian MSC and the Danish Maersk with 580 container ships.
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He has, however, weathered many storms. So how can these exceptional results be explained? Yann Allix, general delegate of the “C’est facile” foundation, and specialist in the maritime, port and logistics world: ” CMA CGM’s earnings have been multiplied by 12 over the last 24 months. So indeed, there is an incredible success at the economic and macroeconomic level of CMA CGM. And these superprofits result from the interplay of supply and demand. We all found ourselves somewhat confined, we had to equip ourselves and we had an e-commerce request that had never been experienced. This is truly the reflection of a market logic which has experienced a form of bubble over 24 months in a world of supply chain where we had never experienced such tension between the factory of the world which is China and the rest of the world which needed products and which could not have access to these products without the shipping companies. »
On the strength of these good results, this discreet boss continued to expand his empire at sea, on land, and in the air. It has just acquired large maritime terminals in New York. It operates warehouses and cargo planes all over the world. He recently acquired 9% of the capital of Air France-KLM airline.
The year 2023 promises to be difficult
But the tide is turning, recognizes Rodolphe Saadé on France Inter: “ What I see for the year 2023, I see a difficult year. Because of the energy crisis, because of the tensions between Ukraine and Russia. So Europe is going through a complicated period. »
Jérôme de Ricqlès is a sea freight specialist at Upply : « We have a set of fairly negative signals as we approach 2023. So the shipping companies, knowing that this exceptional period was not going to last, very quickly reinvested their profits in other logistics links which are less volatile than the price. freight which fluctuates rapidly depending on supply and demand. »
Another challenge for the French shipowner, the energy transition in order to achieve zero carbon by 2050, knowing that maritime freight is a very polluting activity, because boats need heavy fuel oil to navigate.
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