Premium size Norwegian line-caught haddock is fetching anything up to £2.80 (€3.30/$4.50) per kilo on auction at the moment, Ken Wood, business development manager at Carisma UK, told IntraFish.
“We’ve seen trawler-caught haddock start to move upwards as well, but not to such a dramatic price as line-caught, while fresh haddock has been making a premium on the Grimsby market,” Wood said.
'People will just switch off'
There will be a point where people will just switch off, however, another UK buyer told IntraFish, although this hasn’t happened just yet.
“I think what is happening is people have tried to transfer their haddock business to cod without it being successful because retailers do not switch products so quickly, and there are also a lot of people buying haddock to service existing contracts fast,” th buyer said.
“There will have to be a point when people say, 'We just can’t supply it anymore,' but when that will be is the $64 million question.”
According to the buyer, headed & gutted (H&G) prices are currently standing at more than £4,000 (€4,745/$6,418) a metric ton. When negotiating future contracts, suppliers are quoting as much as 20 percent above this on some lines, he said.
“If you are looking to forward buy at China at the moment, with a shipment in November time, prices are up maybe 15-20 percent on where they were last time you placed a contract,” he told IntraFish.
Additionally, people who are buying cod at the moment are probably using that to get access to haddock.
“There is an abundance of cod and people have cod so if you can throw any cod business to a possible supplier, you are going to want to make sure you get some haddock as well with that because everybody has the cod,” the buyer said.
But simply, the biggest problem is that there is a shortage of haddock available for the market, he said.
Quotas
The supply of haddock has been, and continues to be constrained, confirmed Jon Stefansson, head of research at Marko Partners, which has affected the price and kept it relatively high for most of the year. This trend is likely to continue for some time.
“There has been some substitution – cod being substituted for haddock – in those markets where the supply is constrained, but maybe not to the extent that you would have expected,” Stefansson said.
Meanwhile, until the quotas have been decided and are out there in “black and white," no one knows what is going to happen to haddock, added Ken Wood. “But I forecast a very difficult year ahead on haddock,” he said.
In particular, buyers are concerned with reports quotas could fall a further 20 percent next year on top of the 20 percent drop that happened this year, which would add up to “quite a severe drop,” one buyer said.
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(seafood.vasep.com.vn) Between 2015 and 2024, Vietnamese pangasius exporting enterprises have undergone notable transformations in rankings and experienced fluctuations in developmental strategies, competitive intensity, and business efficacy. This dynamic is clearly illustrated through shifts in export turnover and the proportional contribution to the national pangasius export volume among the Top 5 enterprises.
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