Land-based salmon farmer raises £1.2m from follow-up share issue

Land-based fish farmer Gigante Salmon has sold just over half of 4.6 million new shares made available in a subsequent offering following a private placement of 34.6 million shares in June.

The company fired its former chief executive Helge Albertsen in March because of huge cost overruns in construction of its 16,000-tonnes-per-year facility in Norway, and announced in April that it would use a bank loan and a private placement to raise an extra NOK 350 million (£25.8m) required to complete the farm on the island of Lille Indre Rosøya in Rødøy municipality.

Gigante Salmon raised NOK 225m in gross proceeds through the allocation of 34,615,384 new shares at a price of NOK 6.50 in the over-subscribed private placement in June. Its majority owner, Gigante Havbruk AS, was awarded 20 million shares for a total amount of NOK 130m in the placement.

NOK 16.1 million

Following the placement, it announced a subsequent offering of 4,615,384 new shares at NOK 6.50. Subsequent offerings are used to enable existing shareholders who didn’t take part in a private placement to top up their stake so that they maintain their percentage of equity, and in this case around 54% of the new shares on offer were sold.

“The board of the company has today resolved that a total of 2,473,951 offer shares will be allocated at the offer price in accordance with the allocation criteria set out in the national prospectus, raising gross proceeds of approximately NOK 16.1 million (£1.2m),” Gigante Salmon said in a stock market announcement this afternoon.

Gigante Salmon will grow salmon in raceways in three rectangular pools excavated into the bedrock of Lille Indre Rosøya. The intention is to use one pool to grow post-smolts to 1kg before they are transferred to the other pools for grow-out.

There are already post-smolts in the one pool that has been completed, and as of mid-June the fish had an average weight of well over 300 grams.