Sanford Earnings FC effected by FX changes

[iceman]

A question for those knowlegable about fishing;

Would Sanford be better off giving the Koreans and their rust-bucket slave ships the flick and investing in high-tech state of the art factory trawlers?

Boop boop de do

Marilyn

HI MM,
I know a little about fishing so hope I qualify to try and respond to your very worthwile question. There is no question that the Koreans and other foreign flagged vessels have served an important purpose over the years in developing NZ deepwater fisheries, especially for the lower value species.
But the time to see rust bucket Korean vessels where crew is maltreated and made work in unsafe and unacceptable conditions, is well and truly over and should not be accepted in NZ. These are now being phased out over the next 3-4 years, the Koreans all but gone already.

But I do believe that there will still be an opening for a small number of well run foreign crewed/owned vessels to catch some species that may not be commercially viable for NZ vessels with Kiwi crew to catch.
But China is buying an increasing amounts of all types of seafood at better prices than we have had in the past and this may well make these species more commercially viable in the medium term future.

The second part of your question is a good one. Our industry is run by a management system which is very similar to Iceland, where fishing is of similar importance to agriculture here in NZ.
The Icelandic industry is without a doubt a World leader in techology with a very up-to-date fleet, a fleet that makes a lot of money for both the companies and the share of catch paid crew. There has been tendency in the NZ industry for 20 years now to drive down salaries of fishermen and the result is a serious lack os skills in the industry to man a fleet of new and up to date vessels. Sanford´s current deepwater vessels are over 25 years old which is ancient in this game. But it is a NZ industry wide problem and needs a complete change in attitudes and directions from industry tops.

Unfortunately this attitude and aversion to new technology, new investments and high salaries is not limited to the vessels. Our fish factories are also completely outdated with most of the work being done manually, such as fish filleting by hand.
You look at fish factories in Iceland and Norway where you see only a handful of people and everything is automated.
But along side tIceland´s booming fishing industry, they also have booming tech and manufactoring industries with companies for example making high tech fish processing, fisheries research and fishing gear products that are sought after worldwide and demand premium on prices

So I suppose my long winded answer (sorry for that) is that yes, the NZ fishing industry needs to step up a few gears. We have a great resource that is relatively well managed with a stable management system but we need to utilise it much better for the good of the country and the people that work in the industry.

The " Kiwi ingenuity" approach simply does not work in todays World !

[Marilyn Munroe]

Thanks for your informative reply Iceman.

I have heard reports that a red meat processing factory was able to improve their yield by 3% - 4% switching from manual to automated processing.

If such gains are able to be carried over to fish processing then a decision to automate would seem a good idea.

Boop boop de do

Marilyn