The first line he opened went back to Beirut
Jacques Saadé left in 1978 with one ship and four employees. Of every route on earth available to him, the one he ran first was the one home.
On the thirteenth of September 1978, in Marseille, a Lebanese man registered a shipping company. It had four employees, one ship, and one service.
The service ran Marseille to Beirut.
He had left Beirut because the war had made the city impossible to work from. Almost everything he had built was behind him. And the first thing he did, with the only vessel he owned, was open a line back to the place he had just left.
That is not sentiment. It was also the trade he knew better than anyone else on that coast, and he was a serious commercial operator rather than a romantic. But both things are true at once, and the record should say so.
Jacques Saadé was born in Beirut in 1937. He read at the London School of Economics, graduating in 1957, and went into the family business not long after.
Then Lebanon came apart, and he was in his forties starting again in a foreign port with four people and a boat.
Two things, and he was early on both.
The first was the container. He believed freight would be standardised into boxes and that the vessels carrying them would keep getting larger, at a time when plenty of established operators thought otherwise.
The second was China. In 1986 he launched a service linking northern Europe to Asia. In 1992 he opened an office in Shanghai. That is before China was the world’s factory, and it is the decision that separates a good shipping company from an enormous one.
Then he bought. Compagnie Générale Maritime in 1996, which gave the company the second half of its name. ANL in 1998. Delmas in 2005. COMANAV and US Lines in 2007.
CMA CGM is the third largest container shipping company in the world.
Five hundred and ninety three vessels. Four and a half million containers of capacity. A hundred and sixty thousand employees. Revenue of fifty five and a half billion dollars in 2024. Four hundred offices in a hundred and sixty countries, calling at four hundred and twenty of the world’s five hundred and twenty one commercial ports.
It is run from a tower in Marseille that he built in 2006 and that the city now uses as a landmark.
He died in 2018, aged eighty one. His son Rodolphe had taken over as chief executive the year before.
We have written here that nothing compounds. That the Lebanese abroad built enormous wealth and almost nothing that outlives the people who built it, and that Danny Thomas is close to the only exception.
This is the hardest case against that argument, and it should be put at its strongest. A man arrived in a foreign port with one ship and left behind a company that moves a meaningful fraction of world trade, and it passed to the next generation without breaking.
But it does not quite break the rule, and the reason is worth being precise about.
A company that goes from father to son is succession. An institution is a thing that survives when nobody of that name is left in the building. St Jude has outlived Danny Thomas by more than thirty years and is larger now than when he was alive. CMA CGM has not yet been asked that question, because a Saadé still runs it and a Saadé sits on the board beside him.
So the honest position is that it is not proof, it is a pending case. Ask again in forty years.
ONE MORE THING, AND IT IS THE REASON HE IS ON THIS PAGE AND NOT A PHOTOGRAPH
He is on our roll of forty and he is one of the ten we could not find a picture for.
We searched Wikimedia, other language Wikipedias, Wikidata, Openverse and the Internet Archive. There is no photograph of Jacques Saadé that we are free to publish, so his entry on the record is a typographic plate with his name on it and no face above it.
A Lebanese man built the third largest shipping line on earth, and we could not lawfully show you what he looked like.
That is the whole problem this record exists for, in one line. The monuments survive. The faces do not.