Ellingsen Seafood on Norway’s exposed Lofoten Archipelago has brushed aside yet another season of bad weather to post super-strong results.
“It’s good to be a salmon-farmer. We have never harvested as many salmon as we did last year and never seen as high an average price as we did last year,” managing director, Line Ellingsen told Norwegian newspaper, Dagens Naeringsliv.
The company — one of the pioneers of Canadian and Alaskan salmon-farming — achieved a pretax profit of 2017 of EUR 31.3 million, up about 62 percent over 2016. Turnover, too, skyrocketed from EUR 50.5 in 2016 to EUR 78.2 million for 2017.
Although the salmon price last week averaged EUR 7.09 per kilogram, Ellingsen had large amounts of its salmon on long-term contracts. At average weights of a little under 4 kg, the company achieved a price of around EUR 12.5 per salmon on the spot market.
According to Ellingsen, the company has earned a per-fish profit of 50 percent: “It might be a fantastic year in 2018. An insane amount of salmon has been harvested in the first months, and there are fewer salmon still in the sea than expected.”
“That means prices could stay high. I think 2018 might be just as good as 2017.”
