Nine big seafood M&A moves to watch for in 2019

By Jason Huffman, Tom Seaman and Jason Smith

The seafood industry has a fever and the only thing that will cool it down in 2019 is more consolidation.

To say there were a lot of mergers and acquisitions in 2018 would be an understatement. Undercurrent News has identified 127 deals, up from 117 in 2017 and 102 in 2016. The fourth quarter of 2018 alone saw 42 deals, the most since we started tracking in January 2015. The joint second-highest quarter for deals was Q3 of last year when we recorded 34, the same as in Q4 of 2017.

These deals include quite a few big ones in multiple sectors, from salmon aquaculture in Chile to fishing firms, processors, wholesalers and exporters in Europe, the US, Canada, and Asia. But the global M&A party is not nearly over based on the conditions, as suggested by Ignacio Kleiman, a managing partner at Antarctica Advisors, in Miami, Florida, in an earlier interview.

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