Early Life & Background

Casablanca, 1954

Saïd Alj was born in Casablanca on 27 January 1954. He holds Moroccan and Belgian nationality, and lives in Anfa, the residential district on the city’s western heights. Beyond these facts, little about his childhood and schooling has been reliably published, and nothing further is asserted here.

The years that follow his birth are, however, among the most consequential in modern Moroccan history — and they shaped the commercial world he would later enter. What follows describes that setting, not his personal experience of it.

A city built on trade

By 1954 Casablanca was already the economic capital of Morocco and one of the busiest ports in Africa. Its growth had been extraordinary and compressed: a modest coastal town at the turn of the century, it had become within fifty years a city of docks, canneries, textile mills, banks and insurance houses, laid out in the ambitious modernist architecture that still defines its centre.

That industrial base was not incidental to what came later. The canning industry in particular — processing the sardine and anchovy landed along the Atlantic coast — had been a significant Moroccan export sector since the 1920s. It is the industry in which Alj would eventually build his most substantial company.

Independence and its economic aftermath

Morocco regained its independence in 1956, when Alj was two years old. The decades that followed reshaped who owned the Moroccan economy. Foreign-held agricultural land was recovered through the 1960s, and in 1973 the Moroccanisation measures required majority Moroccan ownership across wide areas of commerce and industry. Businesses that had been in French, Spanish or other foreign hands passed into Moroccan ones.

The effect was to create, within a single generation, a domestic industrial and commercial class in cities like Casablanca and Fez. The trading and manufacturing families of that generation would supply much of Morocco’s private-sector leadership for the rest of the century.

Trained to run companies

Alj studied in Paris at the École des dirigeants et créateurs d’entreprise. The school’s name states its purpose exactly: it exists to train directors and founders of companies. That is a different formation from the general management or public-administration routes that produced many of his contemporaries, and it is consistent with the path he took — ownership and operating control rather than professional management of someone else’s business.

He is reported to have begun his working life in France and Belgium before returning to Morocco. The Belgian connection proved durable: he holds Belgian nationality, serves as Honorary Consul of Belgium, and has been made a Commander of the Order of the Crown, one of the kingdom’s principal honours.

The opening he returned into

Alj founded Sanam Holding in 1986. Within a few years, Morocco began a structural adjustment and liberalisation programme that would privatise state holdings, deepen the Casablanca Stock Exchange, and progressively open sectors that had been closed or state-directed. For a Moroccan owner with capital, industrial appetite and the patience to restructure incumbents, the 1990s presented an unusual set of openings.

His entry into Unimer in 1993 came precisely in that window, and the shape of everything afterwards followed from it.