Cooke Scotland made £34.2m profit in 2020
Scotland’s fourth-biggest salmon farmer, Cooke Aquaculture, made a pre-tax profit of £34.2 million last year on revenue of £170.7m, its newly published report for the year ended December 31, 2020, shows.
Revenue was slightly higher than the £169.3m made the year before but pre-tax profit was around £5.8m down on the £39.96m achieved in 2019.
Post-tax profit for Canadian-owned Cooke was £27.6m (2019: £32.7m).
Robust markets
Managing director Colin Blair wrote in the report that the company had implemented changes to ensure the company’s fish could still be efficiently and quickly exported to the European Union following Brexit, and that Cooke’s main markets had proved robust during the Covid-19 pandemic, with trading continuing at levels experienced before the pandemic.
The amount of revenue that Cooke Scotland earned from Europe increased from £87.5m in 2019 to £105.5m, while the amount from the UK fell from £52.9m to £46.3m. Revenue from the rest of the world fell from £28.9m to £18.9m.
Cooke paid £11.46m (£10.83m) in wages and other employment costs and increased its workforce from 282 in 2019 to 307.
Directors’ emoluments amounted to £500,947 (£455,939) with the highest paid director receiving £228,000 (£187,579).
1.31 kWh per kilo
The company paid almost £6.6m (£7.3m) in tax.
Cooke Scotland also paid dividends of £79.8m (£2.3m) to its family-owned parent company, Cooke Aquaculture Inc.
Cooke, which farms in Orkney and Shetland, purchased 34,215,779 kWh of energy in 2020, which equated to 1.31 kWh per kilo of salmon processed.
