According to the company’s first-half year trading update, Russian Sea Group sold 245 tons of Atlantic salmon harvested from its farms in fjords close to the Norwegian borders. In the second half of the year, another 4000 will be harvested. Revenues from aquaculture rose from only 3 million rubles (€60,000) in 2013 to 201 million rubles (€4 million) in 2014.
Russian Sea Group has four farms in the Barents Sea. Two of these were opened in Titovka Bay earlier this year. These have now been stocked with 3.3 million smolt which should reach market-ready size by the end of 2015. In July the company opened a processing plant in Ura-Guba which can process 70 tons per day.
Russian consumers in 2013 bought 295 thousand tons of Norwegian seafood products, 81 percent of it salmon. Every week, an average of 134 trucks loaded with fresh Norwegian salmon and trout crossed the Russian border. When Russia on August 7 introduced an import ban of seafood from Norway as an answer to Norway’s affiliation to EU sanctions against Russia, Russian Sea Group’s shares climbed almost 23 percent. The company was accused of doubling the price of salmon in towns like Murmansk, something the company denied.
The original list over foodstuffs banned from import to Russia included smolt for aquaculture. Russia does not have any smolt production of its own yet and imports nearly all of the needed salmon smolt from Norway. The Russian Fish Union was quick to warn that Russia would have slaughtered its last farmed salmon by 2016 if the import of smolt from Norway was not resumed, and smolt was one of the few foodstuffs that were taken out of the embargo list on August 20.
Russian Sea is owned by Gennady Timchenko and Maksim Vorobyov.
