Iberconsa was never likely to attract Asian investment, advisors say

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Despite completing deals to expand their supply lines in Northern Europe and North America, major Asian trading giants such as Maruha Nichiro or Nippon Suisan Kaisha are unlikely to take any interest — at least for the immediate future — in buying wild catch enterprises in Spain and Latin America, top financial advisors told Undercurrent News.

Speaking on Undercurrent’s “What COVID-19 Means for Seafood M&A” webinar on June 4, Jose Antonio Zarzalejos — a partner with banking house “It’s not a coincidence that Nomura had the sales side mandate for Iberconsa. They were very clear they wanted to attract interest from Asian buyers, but that didn’t happen.”

Ignacio Kleiman, managing partner at the boutique seafood advisory firm Antarctica Advisors, echoed Zarzalejos’ thoughts on the Iberconsa sale.

“The issues that you have with Asian buyers in many cases are due to scale and often a lack of management capability,” he told Undercurrent. “Even though they are good traders and they purchase products from around the world, they do not [usually] have the management capability expertise for cross-border [deals], to go and take over a major fishing operation overseas.”

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Pandemic forces salmon farmers to look at downstream M&A, advisors say

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The COVID-19 pandemic is likely to drive more salmon farmers to look at buying into processing to secure access to their target markets, said financial advisors from Pareto Securities and Antarctica Advisors.

Speaking on Undercurrent News’ “What COVID-19 Means for Seafood M&A” webinar (watch in full below) on June 4, Henning Lund, a senior partner at the Norwegian advisory  rm Pareto, said upstream consolidation of the salmon sector would likely continue as before, with “new regulations and generation shifts more likely to impact the sector than the pandemic”.

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M&A advisor: ‘Who’s going to be next Cooke?’

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More diversified global seafood players like Cooke are needed to bring stability to the industry, said a senior mergers and acquisitions (M&A) advisor during an Undercurrent News webinar on the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on deals.

Ignacio Kleiman, whose Antarctica Advisors is the most prolific M&A advisory firm according to Undercurrent’s latest Seafood Dealmakers 2020 report, said more players like Cooke would make the sector more robust in riding out global crises.

“Who’s going to be the next Cooke? Clearly, in order to be successful in the world of seafood, you have to be sizeable and you have to be diversified by species. You have to be diversified by currency. You have to be diversified by geography,” he said, on the “What COVID-19 Means for Seafood M&A” webinar.

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