Spain’s Profand Fishing Holding has moved to acquire Spanish retail group Mercadona’s processing firm Caladero, after buying Stavis Seafoods and investing in Seafreeze in the US.

Zaragoza, Spain-based Caladero will add a new range of species Profand’s portfolio. Caladero processes salmon, trout, seabream and seabass, as well as sardines, in addition to octopus, squid and shrimp Profand is known for.

Vigo, Spain-based Profand agreed to buy 100% of Caladero, which specializes in products in modified atmosphere packaging MAP) trays for Mercadona, which took control of the plant in 2010 after it ran into difficulties under Carlos Amoros, its former owner. The plan at the time was to eventually find an industry buyer such as Profand, which is the main supplier of cephalopods to the retailer.

The deal, which is pending approval by the Spanish competition authority, will allow Profand to “boost its growth and consolidate its leadership in Spain in both volume and efficiency and productivity”, the company said.

The MAP-focused Caladero plant in Zaragoza has 55,000 square meters of production area with a capacity total of 21,000 metric tons of product per year, employing some 600 staff.

Caladero will add €200 million ($222.50m) and a net profit of €3.4m to Profand’s growing business. When Undercurrent News revealed Profand’s move for Seafreeze, done in partnership with Michael Tourkistas, the founder of US shellfish processor East Coast Seafood Group, it emerged the deal would take the company past $500m. So, the addition of Caladero will make the wider Profand group to around $720m in annual sales.

“This is a strategically important transaction both for Profand and for the Spanish seafood industry as a whole. The sector was deeply affected by the 2008/09 financial crisis and this transaction is recognition of the fabulous recovery the sector experienced,” Ignacio Kleiman, founding partner of Antarctica Advisors, told Undercurrent News.

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Bristol Bay Native Corporation (BBNC) is pleased to announce the pending acquisition of Blue North Fisheries and Clipper Seafoods, two leading operators in the sustainably-managed freezer longline cod sector of the Bering Sea fishery. Effective September 30th, this acquisition will put BBNC, an Alaska Native corporation with deep cultural ties to fishing, in a position to bring Bering Sea earnings home to Alaska, benefiting its 10,000 shareholders as well as the local economy.

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Our exclusive survey of over 300 top seafood executives gives guidance to where the industry is headed. Download it now!

Seafood executives are in an optimistic space right now, with many saying they expect higher revenues, more M&A activity and more investment in infrastructure and new product development in the coming year.

That’s according to results of an exclusive email survey IntraFishconducted with over 300 top global seafood industry executives earlier this year. The survey’s findings were revealed during the IntraFish Leadership Breakfast during Seafood Expo North America in Boston in March.

DOWNLOAD THE FULL SURVEY HERE! (pdf)

The survey respondents represented various sectors of the seafood industry, but largely self-identified as being in the aquaculture, processing, wholesaling and distribution sectors.

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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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The likely upcoming sale process for Portobello Capital’s stake in Grupo Iberica de Congelados (Ibercosa) will attract a lot of trade and private equity interest, with the Madrid, Spain-based  private equity (PE) investor in a strong position, said one banker.

According to one source, Gorjan Nikolik of Rabobank, investors should look at unifying Ibercosa and Grupo Nueva Pescanova. However, Nikolik acknowledged the issues with a move like this. Other sources said this is not likely to be a move the management of Ibercosa is likely to want to see, at least in the short-term.

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