Investors throw in the towel.
After soaring on the stock exchange in its first three years, Atlantic Sapphire has been a story of suffering in the last two. A continuous series of negative profit announcements, production problems, fire, disease and fish mortality have caused the share price to collapse.
Early on Monday morning, it became known that the company is once again experiencing increasing mortality and has seen itself forced to harvest fish with an average weight of only two kilos .
Harvest of small fish means low prices and high production costs per kilo, which in turn portends significantly lower earnings than the expectations in the market.
Now a good number of investors have clearly had enough, and are sending the share price down by as much as 42 percent in the first hour of trading on the Oslo Stock Exchange.
During the last six months, the company’s share price has fallen by 78 percent, which above all reflects declining confidence in the financial market.
Last week it also became known that Atlantic Sapphire’s founders Bjørn-Vegard Løvik and Johan E. Andreassen have bought 1,538 tonnes of MAB (maximum allowed biomass), equivalent to two farming licences, for NOK 241.9 million (€24.2 million). The licenses are purchased via the company Prophylaxia, with a business address in Vikebukt in Romsdal.
