CMA CGM

CMA CGM was founded in Marseille in 1978 by Jacques Saadé, who had left Lebanon during its civil war and started the company with a single ship on a route connecting France to the Caribbean and Central America. Unlike most of its peer group, it never went public and remains controlled by the Saadé family, with Jacques's son Rodolphe Saadé now serving as chairman and chief executive. The company grew from a single-route operator into one of the world's largest container lines largely through a sequence of acquisitions rather than organic fleet-building alone: it absorbed the Australian National Line, then the Finnish-founded Containerships, and in 2016 completed its largest purchase, American President Lines (APL), a deal that also brought a Singapore-listed holding structure and a long-haul Transpacific franchise dating back to the 19th century. Each acquired company's container fleet kept its original identity to a surprising degree, which is why CMA CGM boxes still carry APL, ANL and Containerships markings on the water today.

On the fleet side, CMA CGM has been among the fastest-growing of the major carriers through the first half of 2026, adding roughly 235,500 TEU of capacity in that period alone and putting its 400th company-owned vessel into service, part of an owned-and-chartered fleet of more than 650 ships totaling around 4.39 million TEU. It has roughly 1.8 million TEU on order. CMA CGM is a founding member of the Ocean Alliance alongside COSCO Shipping, Evergreen and OOCL, a grouping that in 2026 marked ten consecutive years of joint operations and has been extended through 2032; the alliance's newest network design deploys 394 vessels and roughly 5.3 million TEU of combined capacity across 41 East-West services, with CMA CGM contributing about 130 ships to that pool. Its own network spans the main deep-sea trades — Asia-Europe, Transpacific, Transatlantic and Asia-Mediterranean — plus a dense set of Indian Ocean, Middle East, Caribbean and Latin American services built up from the acquired carriers' regional strengths.

CMA CGM has also diversified further beyond ocean freight than most competitors. Its 2019 purchase of CEVA Logistics, a global contract-logistics and freight-forwarding group, gave it a warehousing and inland-transport arm that now runs semi-independently and continues to make its own acquisitions, including the 2026 purchase of Italian heavy-lift specialist Fagioli and a planned move into French, Spanish and Portuguese e-commerce delivery through its Colis Privé subsidiary. It has also built an air cargo division, CMA CGM Air Cargo, operating a small owned-and-partner fleet (including aircraft under the Air Belgium brand) out of hubs in France, Belgium and the United States, so that a single customer relationship can span ocean, air, warehousing and last-mile delivery. In its most recent quarterly results, CMA CGM reported that revenue from these non-shipping activities grew nearly 48% year on year, outpacing growth in its core container business — a sign the group is trying to insulate itself from container-rate cycles rather than simply operating more ships. For Pakistani importers and exporters who book on CMA CGM strings into Karachi or Port Qasim, Maalbardaar tracks the shipment and manages customs clearance end to end regardless of which of the group's historical brands appears on the container.