Five years ago, Robert Yuksel Yildirim was planning to sell his business group’s 24% holding in CMA CGM.
Today, as the coronavirus pandemic catapults the container liner’s profits to giddying heights, Yildirim is relieved he never pulled the trigger on the sale.
“I’m glad I didn’t sell it,” the chairman of the Yildirim Group told TradeWinds on the sidelines of the Turkish Maritime Summit on Saturday.
“CMA CGM is in an amazing place. They had $23bn of Ebitda and this year that number is likely to increase to $30bn,” Yildirim said.
In 2018, Yildirim estimated his CMA CGM stake to be worth about $2.5bn to $3bn. Today, he refrains from making any such calculations.
Asked by TradeWinds to assess the stake’s value, he said: “I don’t know, you tell me.”
Yildirim acknowledged he may cash out “eventually, one day”, as he generally dislikes owning minority stakes.
“I like to be in the driver’s seat — not in the passenger seat,” he said.
If anybody came “with a good offer”, Yildirim said he would consider selling.
However, in the same breath, he clarified he is not in any rush to sell. Without a good offer, he would gladly keep the stake.
“CMA CGM is good for me now. It’s like a good heritage for my children,” he said, adding that the French liner has become “too big to fail”.
“It’s a big organisation — they have capital, they make money. They’re not a shipping company anymore, they’re in logistics and the air cargo business.
CMA CGM’s success is particularly gratifying, considering the criticism he faced when he invested $600m in the company in 2010, Yildirim said.
“That crazy investment was considered one of the stupidest decisions in the international maritime industry back then,” he told participants at the Istanbul gathering.
“For almost a year, people talked about what a stupid person I was,” he said. “But after a couple of years, people’s minds started to change.”
Yilport expanding
Despite being a shareholder in CMA CGM, Yildirim’s port operating company Yilport sometimes competes with the French liner when bidding to buy ports.
Yilport, one of the world’s most rapidly expanding firms in its field, is the world’s 11th biggest port operator and plans to be in the top 10 by 2025.
With terminals and onshore logistics centres in Turkey, Portugal, Italy, Spain, Sweden and across Latin America, Yildirim is now setting his sights on the US and Canada.
“My main goal is north America,” said Yildirim, who studied at Oregon State University and whose first job was as an engineer designing gantry cranes for a Mitsui unit in California in the early 1990s.
After failing in a tender at Savannah, Yildirim told TradeWinds that he considers greenfield and other projects at locations near Baltimore and Philadelphia.
Yilport has already a significant footprint in Latin America, and is in talks to buy and build even more terminals there, from Guatemala and El Salvador to Panama and Ecuador.
Concerns about a global recession coming aren’t stymying Yildirim’s thirst for expansion.
“We invest in bad times for good times,” he said.
