by Lloyd's List
7 March 2025 (Lloyd's List) - CMA CGM chief executive Rodolphe Saadé vowed to invest billions of dollars in the US and to help grow the US-flagged fleet as he stood alongside US President Donald Trump in the Oval Office on Thursday.
Saade said the French liner giant will invest $20bn in “shipping and logistics” over the next four years and is also “looking at investing in shipbuilding of container vessels, and we most probably will be making an announcement in the next coming weeks.”
The move comes amid the Trump administration’s push to reviatlise the US shipbuilding sector, with Trump recently announcing plans to form a new office of shipbuilding in the White House. On Thursday, Trump said the US will announce a new shipbuilding programme in the coming weeks.
“We used to build a ship a day, and now we essentially don’t build ships, we’re going to start [doing] that, and we’re going to be announcing next week or the week after a massive new programme for building very large [ships], the largest ships in the world,” said Trump as he announced CMA CGM’s investment.
Saade said the company also plans to expand its US-flagged fleet from 10 vessels to 30 and will “hopefully be doing more in the months to come”. CMA CGM’s US-flagged vessels operate under subsidiary American President Lines.
Trump then asked Saade about the widespread use of open registries. “Why is it that more people don’t have American flags? they seem to have Panamanian flags and Liberian flags, they don’t seem to have a lot of American flags?”
Saade promised Trump that this will change.
“You will have more ships with US flags as we move forward, and you can count on us to do as much as we can.”
In a statement, CMA CGM said the planned investment will span four years, create 10,000 new jobs, “foster US shipbuilding capabilities, expand port infrastructure, grow logistics networks, and develop air cargo services”.
The company had previously announced plans to upgrade its two terminals in the port of New York and New Jersey, which it acquired from Global Container Terminals in 2022. It was not immediately clear how much of the $20bn represented new investments.
