A.P. Moller Capital Agrees to Buy Control of a Moroccan Logistics Group

MOROCCO · BUSINESS

A.P. Moller Holding’s infrastructure fund arm has agreed to buy control of a Moroccan logistics group, subject to competition clearance. A.P. Moller Capital agreed on 17 August to take a majority stake in Casablanca-based Globex Investissement, without disclosing either the price or the size of the holding.

What A.P. Moller Capital is buying in Moroccan logistics

Globex Investissement is not a household name outside Morocco, which is rather the point. It is the layer underneath the headline economy: the trucks, the customs paperwork, the warehouse space and the parcels.

The group was founded in 1998 as the exclusive licensee for FedEx Express in Morocco, and it still holds that franchise. Around it has grown a business covering express delivery, road freight, freight forwarding, customs clearance and warehousing, employing more than 350 people.

It has also pushed south. Globex holds FedEx and TNT licences in Senegal and Cameroon, which gives a Casablanca company a working presence in two very different West and Central African markets.

In October 2024 it bought Logic Transport and Logic Overseas outright, taking on more than 150 trucks and over 155 staff. That purchase turned a forwarder into an operator of its own fleet.

Founder Omar El Kadiri stays on as chief executive. The pan-African fund manager Amethis, which took a 30.5% minority stake in 2022, has announced its exit after four years. The balance of the company is held by Goldfin, the El Kadiri family holding that created Globex, so a sale of control requires Goldfin to sell down as well.

Why this is not a Maersk acquisition

The temptation to write “Maersk buys Moroccan logistics group” is strong and it would be wrong. A.P. Moller Capital is an infrastructure fund manager that sits inside the A.P. Moller Group and sits inside the A.P. Moller Group as one of A.P. Moller Holding’s principal holdings.

A.P. Moller Holding is also the controlling shareholder of A.P. Moller-Maersk, with 45.32% of the shares and 52.5% of the votes. That makes the fund manager and the shipping line sisters under a common parent, not the same company.

The confusion is understandable. A.P. Moller Capital’s managing partner and chief executive, Kim Fejfer, ran APM Terminals from 2004 and sat on the Maersk group executive board from 2011.

But the buyer here is a fund, answerable to its investors, and the shipping line has no role in the transaction. It matters because the strategic logic of a fund taking a controlling stake is different from a carrier absorbing a customer.

The money behind the deal

The purchase is being made through two vehicles. Emerging Markets Infrastructure Fund II is investing alongside the APM Capital Morocco Fund, a local fund whose management company, APM Capital Morocco S.A., is authorised and regulated by the AMMC.

The Morocco fund held its final closing in February 2026 on total commitments of MAD 1.64bn, about US$178m. EMIF II committed a further MAD 600m, roughly US$65m, alongside it.

Together that puts about MAD 2.24bn, or some US$243m, behind Moroccan transport and logistics. Those are fund figures, not the Globex price, and the two should not be confused.

The fund was set up as part of the Mohammed VI Investment Fund initiative, the state-backed vehicle designed to pull private capital into Moroccan assets. A.P. Moller Capital held a 49% stake in the grain terminal operator Mass Céréales Al Maghreb from 2020 through Africa Infrastructure Fund I, and sold it in June 2025 to STOA and the Africa50 Infrastructure Acceleration Fund.

APM Capital Morocco is led by Ghislane Guedira. Completion still needs merger clearance from the Conseil de la Concurrence.

Morocco’s port numbers are less flattering than they look

Morocco’s trade infrastructure has been on a run of good headlines. Ports handled 148.6m tonnes in the first half of 2026, up 14.4% year on year, according to figures from the Ministry of Equipment and Water.

The composition is the interesting part. Transshipment accounted for 82.6m tonnes of that, up 28.6%, and transshipment is overwhelmingly Tanger Med, cargo passing through rather than cargo arriving.

Strip it out and the picture cools considerably. National traffic grew 0.6% to 66m tonnes, imports rose 3.6%, and exports actually fell 1.6% to 20.6m tonnes.

Phosphate volumes, a Moroccan staple, dropped 11.2% to 14.6m tonnes. Containers rose 1.7% to 6.3m TEU.

So the case for buying Moroccan logistics is not a booming domestic freight market. It is a bet on where that market goes next.

What it means for the nearshoring trade

European manufacturers moving production out of Asia have to land it somewhere, and Morocco has spent a decade making itself the obvious answer. Automotive and aerospace plants have followed, and so has the paperwork.

Customs brokerage and inland freight are the least glamorous part of that chain and among the hardest to replicate. A firm that already clears goods, holds the FedEx franchise and owns its own trucks is difficult to compete with from a standing start.

The parallel with Latin America is close enough to be useful. The same logic drove private capital into Mexican and Brazilian logistics assets when nearshoring became the argument of the decade.

The difference is that Morocco is doing it with a state investment fund actively seeding the private vehicles. Whether that produces better assets or simply more expensive ones is the question the next few years will answer.

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