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Norway’s salmonid sector saw its profits shrink sharply last year, new Norwegian government figures indicate.
According to the Norwegian Directorate of Fisheries's profitability survey for 2024, companies producing salmon and rainbow trout earned a combined ordinary pre-tax result of NOK 14.3 billion (around €1.22bn /$1.41bn) in 2024, compared with NOK 21.2 billion the previous year.
This amounts to a decline of about 32%, the Directorate says, noting the drop reflects “lower sales prices per kilo of salmon and high costs” throughout the year.
Grow-out operations contributed NOK 11.5 billion to the total, while smolt production brought in NOK 2.8 billion.
The Directorate notes that comparisons with years before 2023 are complicated because many companies reorganised ahead of the introduction of Norway's resource rent tax - the so-called "salmon tax". This shifted more of the reported profits into smolt-production companies, which accounted for less than 10% of the combined result before 2023 but reached 19.6% in 2024.
The figures also show that costs remained high across the sector in 2024, with the average cost of producing a kilo of fish in grow-out facilities standing at NOK 64.64 in 2024, only slightly lower than the year before.
The survey covers around 90% of production licences for both smolt and grow-out sites. The Directorate stresses that its findings reflect the performance of licence-holding companies and may differ from other analyses that look at the full value chain.
The Directorate has been conducting an annual profitability survey on Norway's salmon and trout aquaculture sector since 1982. The full report, including an English language summary, is available on the Directorate of Fisheries website.