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Akva secures multi-million deal on salmon farm to Murmansk

Akva Group sells equipment for aquaculture to several countries, including Russia.

Norwegian aquaculture equipment supplier AKVA Group has concluded a NOK 63.2 million contract with Russian Sea Group on delivery of salmon farming gear.

Location

According to the contract, a complete cage farm system with cages, feed barge and other equipment needed for salmon farming, will be installed to a Russian constumer in the Murmansk region in 2015. The NOK 63.2 million (€7.48 million) contract also includes expansion of already delivered systems, Akva group says in a press release.

AKVA Group CEO Trond Williksen confirms to Undercurrent News that the buyer is Russian Sea – Russia’s largest seafood importer and an aspiring aquaculture company.

Russian Sea has four salmon farms in Ura Bay and Titovka Bay in the Barents Sea, close to the Norwegian border. Earlier this year the company sold the first salmon harvested from these farms. In July the company opened a processing plant in Ura-Guba which can process 70 tons per day.

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 the first half of 2013 to 201 million rubles (€4 million) in 2014.

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 toEU 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.

Russian Sea Group is now losing money because of the weak ruble, Vedomosti reports. Since the Russian import ban on fish products from Norway, the company has been importing salmon from countries as Chile and the Faroe Islands. According to the company it has lost 200 million on the exchange rate of the ruble to the dollar and the euro.

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.