Jacques Saadé

Jacques Saadé founded CMA in Marseille in 1978 with four employees and one chartered vessel, then built it into a global carrier through early expansion into China and the 1996 purchase of state-owned CGM. He led the group until 2017 and died in 2018.

Jacques Saadé was born in Beirut in 1937 to a family with business interests in Lebanon and Syria and studied at the London School of Economics. The Lebanese civil war pushed him to Marseille, where in 1978 he founded Compagnie Maritime d'Affrètement (CMA) with one chartered ship linking Marseille with Beirut and Latakia. He bet early on containerization and on China, opening a Shanghai office in 1992. In 1996 he acquired the privatized state carrier Compagnie Générale Maritime (CGM), creating CMA CGM, and later added Delmas (2005). He handed the chairmanship to his son Rodolphe in 2017 and died on June 24, 2018, aged 81. The group's 23,000 TEU LNG-powered flagship, delivered in 2020, bears his name.