About Saïd Alj

The making of an industrialist

Saïd Alj was born in Casablanca on 27 January 1954. The city he was born into was already Morocco’s commercial engine — a port and financial centre whose merchant families had spent the first half of the century building trading houses, canneries and textile works along the Atlantic coast. He would spend his career adding to that industrial layer rather than departing from it.

He studied in Paris, at the École des dirigeants et créateurs d’entreprise — a school whose purpose, written into its name, is to train people who will run and found companies. He holds both Moroccan and Belgian nationality, and the Belgian connection has remained a working one throughout his life: he serves as Honorary Consul of Belgium, and Belgium later made him a Commander of the Order of the Crown.

Sanam Holding, 1986

In 1986, at thirty-two, he founded Sanam Holding in Casablanca. It has been the structure behind everything since. Sanam is a holding company in the literal sense — a permanent vehicle for owning operating businesses, rather than a fund with an exit horizon. The pattern that follows from that choice is visible across four decades: positions are taken in established companies, restructured, and then kept.

Unimer and the pelagic industry

The transformation that defines his record is Unimer. The company’s origins run back to 1920, when it exported preserves from Morocco under the French protectorate; by the early 1990s it was a canning business among several. Alj was appointed président-délégué in August 1993 and became president in 1995.

What followed was a sustained programme of vertical integration and consolidation. Unimer moved to secure supply and processing capacity around its canning operations, listed on the Casablanca Stock Exchange in March 2001, acquired Top Food the same year, and established UniConserves in 2004 to take the group into olive preserves. In 2010 it absorbed Monégasque-Vanelli Maroc in a transaction reported at around 700 million dirhams, and absorbed Consernor in 2012.

The result is a company that ranks among the world’s largest processors of small pelagic fish — sardine, anchovy and mackerel — with the great majority of its output exported. Its Titus brand is among the most widely recognised canned fish labels in West Africa, and the group operates processing and freezing capacity on the Atlantic coast, including at Agadir and Dakhla.

Building outward

From that industrial base the group extended into adjacent parts of the Moroccan economy: organised food retail through Label’Vie, industrial and equipment distribution through Stokvis Nord Afrique, consumer credit through Taslif, and insurance through the company now trading as Sanlam Maroc, where Alj became chairman in September 2018. Property, hospitality and film-production interests sit alongside them.

Four of the group’s companies are quoted on the Casablanca Stock Exchange, and reported figures put employment across the group above seven thousand people. Neither Forbes nor the Bloomberg Billionaires Index currently lists Alj among the world’s wealthiest individuals, and this site publishes no net-worth estimate.

Succession

Operating responsibility has been moving to the next generation for some years. His son Mehdi Alj leads Sanam Agro and serves as executive vice-president of Sanam Holding; his daughter Kenza Alj oversees the group’s strategic real-estate subsidiaries. He also has a daughter, Hasnae Alj.

One point of frequent confusion is worth settling. Saïd Alj is not the president of the CGEM, Morocco’s employers’ confederation. That office was held by Chakib Alj, a member of the same family and a separate businessman who leads Cap Holding. A number of published profiles conflate the two; they are different people with different companies.