Jacques Saadé
Jacques R. Saadé (Arabic: جاك سعادة) (born 1937) is a French-Lebanese born businessman, living in Marseille, France. He is the founder, group chairman, and chief executive officer of CMA CGM, a French container transportation and shipping company.
Biography
Jacques R. Saadé was born in 1937 in Beirut, Lebanon. He graduated from the London School of Economics in 1957 and took over the family business after the death of his father. His father had “established plants in Syria, we were producing tobacco, cotton seed, olive oil, ice, etc.”.
Based on his fathers advice, after graduation Saadé did an internship in New York to learn about shipping. There he discovered the container (capacity: one cubic metre) used by the American army. “I thought the container was an excellent idea for transporting goods as it was closed, easy and quick.”
The 1978 War in Lebanon prompted him to move to Marseille. There Saadé set up Compagnie maritime d’affrètement (CMA). Initially operating services between Marseille, Beirut and Syria. Saadé quickly made the decision to cross the Suez Canal. In the beginning there was family tension between Jacques Saadé and his brother Johnny. “Their private war was too passionate to be reduced to a simple question of pride or money. In reality, Johnny wanted to kill the more successful father figure he saw in Jacques,” says Antoine Sfeir, Managing Editor of Cahiers de l'Orient, who investigated their quarrel in 2013. After difficult family disputes, Jacques Saadé took the helm alone.