Leadership &
Entrepreneurship

Sanam Holding was set up in 1986 as a holding company and has operated as one ever since. That is a deliberate architectural choice. A fund raises capital against an exit; a holding company owns operating businesses without a clock running on them.

The consequence shows across the portfolio. The Unimer position dates from 1993. The insurance position, taken through the Saham transaction, was retained rather than sold when Sanlam acquired the wider business. Positions are added to the structure; they are rarely removed from it.

Unimer, Stokvis Nord Afrique and Saham Assurance were all long-established Moroccan companies with working industrial or commercial bases before Alj took a position in them. Unimer’s lineage runs to 1920; the insurer’s to 1949, when it was founded as the Compagnie Nord-africaine et Intercontinentale d’Assurance.

The value in each case came from reorganising an existing asset — capacity, distribution, brand — rather than from building one from nothing. It is a capital-intensive, patient approach that suits an owner with a long horizon and little appetite for speculative risk.

Canning small pelagic fish is a low-margin, high-volume industry. Nobody wins it by being marginally better at one step. Advantage comes from controlling the sequence: access to catch, freezing capacity, processing units, and the brand that reaches the consumer.

Unimer’s development follows that logic precisely, with processing and freezing capacity on the Atlantic coast including at Agadir and Dakhla, and with Titus as an owned consumer brand in West African markets rather than a private label packed for someone else. Roughly nine-tenths of production is reported to be exported.

The portfolio looks broad — food processing, supermarkets, industrial equipment, consumer credit, insurance, property. Read another way it is narrow: it is a set of positions along the formalisation of Moroccan consumption.

As Moroccan households moved from informal markets to organised retail, from cash to consumer credit, and from uninsured to insured, the group held a position at each transition. Label’Vie, Taslif and the insurance business are not unrelated bets; they are successive stages of the same shift.

A family holding company has no obligation to list anything. Four of the group’s companies nonetheless trade on the Casablanca Stock Exchange — Unimer, Stokvis Nord Afrique, Label’Vie and the insurer now trading as Sanlam Maroc.

Listing brings continuous disclosure, minority shareholders and a visible share price. It also brings a quoted currency for acquisitions, which is what made the 2010 and 2012 absorptions structurable. Unimer’s introduction to the exchange in March 2001 preceded both.

Founder-built groups commonly fail at succession because the transfer happens too late. Alj has moved operating authority to the next generation while remaining chairman: Mehdi Alj leads Sanam Agro and is executive vice-president of Sanam Holding, and Kenza Alj oversees the strategic real-estate subsidiaries.

The arrangement gives successors real operating responsibility during the founder’s active tenure rather than after it — a materially different proposition from inheriting a group cold.