The CBM experiment, which will be operated at the future accelerator facility FAIR at GSI, will investigate heavy-ion collisions in fixed-target mode at beam energies from 10 to 45 AGeV. It will cover hadronic, leptonic and photonic observables in a large acceptance and with high interaction rates. The focus will rest on extremely rare probes like charm near threshold or dileptonic decays of vector mesons. We discuss the detector layout, the physics programme with respect to heavy flavours and the feasibility to measure strange and charmed hadrons.