Atlantic Sapphire director steps down

On-land salmon farmer Atlantic Sapphire has announced that director Alexander Reus has resigned for personal reasons.

The company’s board said it thanked Reus for his substantial contribution since becoming a director in June 2018.

Reus is a managing partner of DRRT, a company which manages international legal services and is focused on creative loss recovery of investor losses of institutional investors around the world.

Atlantic Sapphire has an ambition to produce 220,000 tonnes of fish annually at its Bluehouse facility at Homestead, Miami-Dade County, Florida. It currently has capacity for around 10,000 tonnes of salmon per year in Phase 1.

8,500 gwt per year

During a live-streamed operational update in August, Atlantic Sapphire’s executives said the company was on the verge of making land-based salmon farming profitable and pointed to reduced operating losses of $12.3 million for the first half of 2022, around a quarter of the $49.7 m lost in the same period the year before.

At what were then the estimated growth rates, a fully stocked Phase 1 farm would yield the equivalent of around 8,500 gutted weight tonnes annually, the company said.

“This would get us into black numbers,” Atlantic Sapphire managing director Karl Øystein Øyehaug said in a Q&A at the end of the update.

However, in October the company reported above normal and increasing mortality in certain systems, necessitating early harvest, thus reducing the average harvest weight for the second half of the year and pegging revenue back to the same level as in H1 2022.

Harvest volume expectations for 2023 are not impacted.