The long view
Vision & Legacy
What a founder-built industrial group looks like in its fourth decade — and what has been put in place for the decades after.
Act one
Forty years
A structure designed to outlast its founder
Sanam Holding was founded in 1986 and has never been broken up, floated in its entirety, or sold. That continuity is the central fact of Saïd Alj’s career, and it is also the thing most at risk when a founder-built group reaches this stage.
The standard failure is well understood. A group assembled around one person’s judgement concentrates its most valuable asset in that person. When the transfer finally happens, it happens abruptly, and the structure that took decades to build disperses in a few years.
The arrangements now in place at Sanam are a direct answer to that problem. Rather than defer succession, operating authority has been moved to the next generation while the founder remains chairman — which means successors are running businesses under observation rather than inheriting them cold.
Succession
The next generation, already operating
Mehdi Alj leads Sanam Agro and serves as executive vice-president of Sanam Holding — which places him at the head of the agri-food business that forms the group’s industrial core, and inside the holding structure itself.
Kenza Alj oversees the group’s strategic real-estate subsidiaries, a portfolio distinct enough from the industrial businesses to be run on its own terms.
The division is deliberate and legible: the industrial core and the property portfolio are separated, each with its own operating leadership, both inside a holding company that has not been fragmented.
Act two
The chain
Businesses that are hard to build and slow to displace
The group’s centre of gravity sits in assets with long replacement times: processing and freezing capacity on the Atlantic coast, an export brand with decades of recognition in West African markets, a distribution network, an insurance licence, a listed retail platform.
None of these can be assembled quickly by a competitor with capital alone. That is the durable part of the legacy — not any single company, but a set of positions that took thirty years to occupy and would take comparably long to dislodge.
Reporting in 2026 indicated the group repositioning parts of its portfolio toward food processing and beauty ingredients, moving beyond its seafood origins toward segments with stronger margins and clearer export potential. Whether that shift completes as described remains to be seen; it is recorded here as reported rather than as settled fact.
Beyond the balance sheet
Ouarzazate
Not all of the legacy is industrial. Through CLA Studios and Atlas Corporation Studios, Alj’s interests sit inside the production infrastructure at Ouarzazate, on the southern edge of the High Atlas — the region that has served as location and backlot for a substantial share of the international films set in the ancient world, the desert, or the imagined Middle East.
CLA Studio was developed in partnership with international studio names including Dino De Laurentiis and Cinecittà. The effect of that infrastructure has been to keep production, crews and spending in southern Morocco rather than exporting the work elsewhere — an industrial argument as much as a cultural one, and consistent with how the rest of the portfolio is assembled.