News / CMA CGM pledges $20bn investment to boost US supply chains

French transport group CMA CGM is to plough $20bn into the US maritime economy to support what it said would be the “transformation” of the domestic supply chain.

Announcing the news alongside Donald Trump yesterday, the carrier’s CEO, Rodolphe Saade, said the investment would be rolled out over the next four years, creating 10,000 jobs in the process.

Mr Trump said: “It’s so important, because it’s about shipping. We lost our way. For many years we haven’t done anything. We used to build a ship a day.

“Now, we essentially don’t build ships. We’re going to start that, and next week or the week after we will be announcing a massive new programme, one for building very large ships. The largest ships in the world.”

CMA CGM said part of the investment would be used to bolster the capacity of US flag-carrier, American President Lines (APL), which it owns, increasing its fleet from 10 vessels to 30.

However, maritime analyst and CEO of Vespucci Maritime Lars Jensen suggested it would not be possible to do that with US-built ships anytime soon.

He added: “This can in practice only be done rapidly by re-flagging vessels built in other countries, or by acquiring some from, for example, Matson or Crowley. This is clearly a new development.”

Alongside boosting APL’s capacity, the French group wants to develop port infrastructure across a number of facilities, including Houston, Los Angeles, and New York.

And it will deploy five 777 freighters, “operated by American pilots”, to a new air cargo hub in Chicago.

But Mr Jensen singled out the new capacity for APL as the “only genuine news”, describing the infrastructure improvement as a “continuing process”.

In the Oval Office, Mr Saade said the investment would “further strengthen our partnership with American customers and public authorities”.