Pivoting toward coho and away from risk, Salmones Camanchaca falls into the red in Q2

Christian Molinari

Published on

August 28, 2023

Salmones Camanchaca closed the second quarter of 2023 with net losses as the company took action to reduce environmental risks in its grow-out centers while temporarily halting operations at its main processing plant.

The vertically integrated salmon-farming firm, based in Santiago, Chile, reported its Q2 revenues fell to USD 63.4 million (EUR 58.3 million), 34.9 percent lower than Q2 2022, which the company attributed to a scheduled drop in its harvest plan together with the stoppage at its main processing plant.

“The results obtained in the second quarter are clearly weak, but they are partially a reflection of strategic decisions taken to reduce environmental risks in fjords of the [Los Lagos] region, increasing stockings farther south, as well as improvements and maintenance in the processing plant that was closed for half of the quarter,” Salmones Camanchaca Vice President Ricardo García Holtz said in a release. “All this led to an extraordinary and nonrecurring decrease in the harvested, processed, and sold volumes.”

Like other Chilean salmon farmers, Camanchaca is moving its operations farther south down the country's coast, where the waters are colder and less susceptible to algae blooms and disease outbreaks, such as sea lice.

Camanchaca's cost of sales during the quarter were brought down 18.6 percent year over year in the second quarter to USD 58.5 million (EUR 53.8 million), while administration and sales costs increased 20.7 percent to USD 5.3 million (EUR 4.9 million). Costs combined with revenues brought its earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) before fair value to USD 4.26 million (EUR 3.92 million) – an 83.4 percent plunge from the second quarter of 2022.

For the quarter, net losses reached ...

Photo courtesy of Salmones Camanchaca

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