Camanchaca chairman and Salmones Camanchaca chief exec, Ricardo Garcia, hopes listing in Oslo will give the company a lift.
“Over the last 60 days, I’ve had 150 meetings with investors, but I’ll try (again) here today,” he said, as the North Atlantic Seafood Conference got underway Thursday. He had flown in to Bergen from Santiago to meet investors and the press.
“We have a completely integrated company, with our own brood, 74 concessions in Region X (40 percent); Region XI (50 percent) and Region XII (10 percent) and two processing plants,” he said. He provided a harvested-volume guidance of about 65,000 tonnes for 2018, one fifth of which is trout, the rest Atlantic salmon.
He said the company’s focusing on three things: lowest possible mortality rate; lowest-possible handling and achieving the highest average weight possible.
Surviving shocks
In his presentation, Garcia emphasized Chile’s biological challenges: two massive shocks related to ILA and toxic algae just in the last decade no longer seem strange.
The most important reason fisheries conglomerate Camanchaca spun off and listed in Norway was the superior pricing of shares in Oslo when compared to Santiago. “As you can see, there’s a difference in the valuation, dollar-for-dollar,” Garcia said.
Investor density
“There are two things here — first earnings, which we’ll bring in over the next four to five years — but also for the access to capital,” he said.
Although Camanchaca has yet to become an investor favourite in Oslo, the company has noticed a radical increase in the liquidity of trading, relative to Norwegian salmon shares and compared to the trading of shares on Santiago’s Exchange. It’s exactly this increased trade that he hopes will, over time, remove the rebate on the share’s pricing.
