Seven men and a tyre maker

In 1925 a 26-year-old Paris businessman, Marcel Môme, founded SAGEM with seven employees and 250,000 francs of capital. It made electrical components, tools and cameras, and one of its first big customers was the tyre company Michelin. By the 1930s it had passed 2,000 staff. In 1942, at the request of the French telecoms ministry, it produced its first telex printer, and after the war it moved steadily into defence and aeronautics. Môme ran the company until 1962.

Inertial navigation and the bomb

SAGEM’s defining contract came in 1961, when it was chosen to supply the inertial navigation systems for France’s first ballistic missiles and the navigation and optical systems for its first missile submarines. Inertial navigation, telex machines and later thermal cameras and missile seekers, such as the Mistral seeker in series production from 1988, carried it through the Cold War. In 1999 it bought SFIM, the measuring-instrument and avionics maker, and from 2000 it built guidance kits for the French AASM air-to-ground weapon.

Faxes, phones and the Sperwer

Under Pierre Faurre, who took over after a 1985 management buy-out, SAGEM became a high-tech conglomerate. It made fax machines, Canal+ decoders and, from 1995, GSM phones, at one point holding about half the French market. In the air it developed tactical drones, notably the Sperwer, which served with the French, Dutch, Swedish, Greek and Canadian forces, the Canadians flying it in Afghanistan until 2009. In 2005 SAGEM merged with the engine maker Snecma to form Safran; its phone and communications businesses were spun off.

Fábricas

• Argenteuil · Argenteuil, Val-d’Oise — Pre-war works; part of the staff moved to Montluçon during the war
• Montluçon · Montluçon, Allier

Gente

• Marcel Môme · founder, head of the company 1925–1962
• Robert Labarre · second president, to 1987
• Pierre Faurre · chief executive after the 1985 buy-out

Récords y primicias

• Selected in 1961 for the inertial navigation of France’s first ballistic missiles