The maritime transport group CMA-CGM will acquire the economic newspaper The gallery. In its press release, CMA-CGM talks about The gallery like ” first pure player economic media in the territories, in France and in Africa “. Every word is important, because The gallerywhich was a paper daily for a long time, is now essentially an online medium, with 3 million unique visitors per month and a purely monthly paper edition.
The person who relaunched it, Jean-Christophe Tortora, was no more than a minority shareholder compared to the boss of Atalian, the majority shareholder, but it was he who made The gallery this decentralized digital media, developed on French territories and even in Casablanca.
The editorial line aims to be innovative since, rather than seeking to compete The echoesbelonging to LVMH, The gallery focuses on the development of small and medium-sized enterprises in the regions and has a particular interest in everything related to innovation and economic transformation, particularly around the climate and ecological transition. With its African edition, The Africa Tribunebased in Morocco, the newspaper has also made the Mediterranean a strong area of development, as evidenced by a Europe-Africa forum in Marseille or the recent appointment of an editor-in-chief, Laurence Bottero, in charge of the “Mediterranean -Africa”.
All this no doubt explains why Rodolphe Saadé, the boss of CMA-CGM who is also called the “boss of Marseilles”, has set his sights on The galleryone year after buying Provence, the Marseille daily. The man, who has just bought the logistics activity of Bolloré, has also taken a share of the online media Brut and 9% of the capital of M6. He is clearly positioned as the one who is called upon to replace Bertelsmann, the controlling shareholder of the M6 group, in five years.
The gallery, it is also for Rodolphe Saadé the assurance of being a voice that counts in business circles and political circles. CMA-CGM generated $25 billion in profits last year out of 75 in sales. Obviously, his boss has an interest in avoiding any taxation on superprofits, as well as any excessively restrictive regulations, since he has benefited since 2003 from a simple tax on the tonnage of his nearly 600 boats.
If in addition, it came to the idea of a legislator to increase its taxation given the heavy carbon footprint of its activity, maritime transport, it would be a disaster. Hence his desire to go to the media as he goes to alternative energies such as liquefied natural gas to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050.