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After large numbers of jellyfish killed more than 600,000 fish, parts of the operation on the Isle of Skye are immediately halted. The company claims that it carries a loss of 100 million in the third quarter.
SENIOR MANAGER: CEO Andreas Kvame. The photo was taken during a conference last year.
Paul S. Amundsen / E24
Published:,
The fish company refers to a “high mortality” incident when it reports Friday that the business on the Isle of Skye in Scotland is closing.
Between July and September, a large number of jellyfish killed 627,000 fish. The number corresponds to 1,500 tons.
– We are talking about very small micro-jellyfish. They settle on the gills of fish and block oxygen uptake, CEO Andreas Kvame tells E24.
According to the company, the jellyfish were the so-called “hydrozos”. This is a collective term for several different nettles, where most species are quite small. Some of the types are known to form colonies.
Due to the shutdown and weak market prices as a result of the corona pandemic, Grieg Seafood will lose around $ 100 million in the third quarter, the company stated in Friday’s announcement.
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Describe the numbers of jellyfish as “large.”
– It was enough that it destroyed a lot. They started arriving in July and the situation escalated through August and into mid-September, Kvame says.
Grieg’s boss says there have been some challenges with jellyfish in previous years, but that the number in recent months has been abnormally large.
– This rises and falls a little from one year to the next, and varies greatly depending on the type of jellyfish in question. Some can be quite harmless, while others are more concerning, Kvame says.
The remaining fish in the area will be harvested in the fourth quarter of this year and the first quarter of next. The company expects this to come at high costs after the jellyfish incident.
The company’s stake falls 4.54 percent on the Oslo Stock Exchange after the news broke.
The jellyfish sped up the process
As early as last year, the fish farming company announced that they were considering dumping the facility on the Isle of Skye. The company has a total of five facilities in the area. Most of the company’s British production is in Shetland.
– The incident with the jellyfish has helped speed up the process a bit. We are now working on alternatives.
– What kinds of alternatives are we talking about?
– I can’t get into that. I’ll come back to that when it’s done, says Kvame.
The fish company already emphasized last year that the gap between production in Scotland and Shetland is great, and that this leads to “few synergies”.
Still opportunities
– We have operated the facilities on the two islands as a single unit, but in reality there is too great a distance between them to do so. At the same time, Skye is too small to operate as a separate unit, communications manager Kristina Furnes tells E24.
Therefore, a large amount of equipment must be shipped back and forth between the two areas, he explains.
– It is not optimal and then we do not obtain the production standard that we want. For example, when we had this incident with the jellyfish, it takes time to bring resources to the facility, he says.
He stresses that the evaluation process for operations in Scotland is not over and that there are still opportunities “outside of Grieg”. He also does not want to elaborate on this.
