Mowi's CEO, Ivan Vindheim, during the opening of the company's new post-smolt facility in Norway.
Photo: Mowi.
Mowi yesterday officially opened its new post-smolt facility at its freshwater site in Haukå, outside Florø, in Western Norway. The company's CEO, Ivan Vindheim, was in charge of the inauguration, which marked the end of several years of construction work and a total investment of NOK 600 million (EUR 52 million).
With this expansion, Mowi has increased the number of employees at the facility from 11 to 25, including two apprentices. They will produce 6.4 million post-smolts per year with an average weight of 700 grams in what will become one of the largest post-smolt facilities in the world.
"This is a large and strategically very important investment for Mowi," said Vindheim. "With this facility, we will be able to produce healthy and sustainable food in an even better and more efficient way."
"This is not just a new large facility," added Asgeir Hasund, Director of Mowi Region West. "It is a powerful symbol of growth, innovation and belief in the future. With this facility, we are taking an important step forward – for the company, for the employees and for our entire district. This major investment creates new jobs, strengthens local value creation and contributes to a vibrant district," he concluded.
Last September, at its Capital Markets Day, Mowi presented its plans for continued volume growth of 20% in its farming division - from 500,000 tons to 600,000 tons - and announced that the strategy to achieve this would involve the digitization and automation of its operations, but also a strong investment in post-smolt.
The company added that already this year, 25% of its smolts will be post-smolt. In the relevant regions in Norway, as many as 50% of all smolt released will be post-smolt in 2025, rising to 75% by 2029.
"By releasing more smolt and increasing our use of post-smolt we will be able to harvest 600,000 tonnes of salmon in 2029 thereby reinforcing our position as the world's top producer of Atlantic salmon," Mowi's CEO then explained.
In the release on the new post-smolt facility in Haukå, the Norwegian giant salmon producer recalled that, so far, it has invested almost NOK 2 billion (EUR 173.5 million) in three facilities along the coast and has plans to invest in another four facilities that will increase the number of post-smolts by another 20 million.
"Post-smolts are a key part of the work to improve survival, welfare and productivity in the company," yesterday said Øyvind Oaland Oakland, CEO of Mowi Norway. "By keeping the fish on land until they are larger, we get a more robust smolt that needs significantly less time at sea. We have very good experiences with this so far, and our calculations show that we can almost halve both mortality and the number of delousing by using post-smolt."
Ivan Vindheim also took the opportunity of the inauguration in Haukå to recall that the sector requires stable and predictable framework conditions to carry out this type of investment along the coast.
Norway presented a new aquaculture report in April. In it, the Norwegian government pledged to shift the focus from quantity to sustainability, proposing a new management system that makes it more profitable to operate with low environmental impact and good animal welfare, and committing to granting licenses without volume limits.
The government's proposal, however, is not final as it still has to be dealt with in the Storting - the Norwegian Parliament - and it was precisely the parliamentarians who must decide on the future of aquaculture in Norway that Vindheim referred to.
"These days, politicians are sitting in the Storting and will consider the government's proposal for new regulation of the aquaculture industry. This proposal will significantly reduce industry production, employment, and value creation, especially in Western Norway," he said.
"I both believe and hope that the politicians understand that we as a nation cannot kick our feet under Norway's most important regional industry and ask the government to develop new and better-studied proposals for future regulations," Mowi's CEO concluded.
While that future is being decided in parliament, the Q1 2025 results presented last week showed that the volume growth strategy supported by post-smolt investment is paying off for Mowi. Thus, despite the general decline in salmon prices, improved volumes and costs enabled the Norwegian company to generate operating income of EUR 1.36 billion in the first quarter of the year.
