Lower labour costs and strong growing conditions have attracted several Western Australian barramundi producers to South-East Asia during the past few months.
Lower labour costs and strong growing conditions have attracted several Western Australian barramundi producers to South-East Asia during the past few months.
Perth-based barramundi producer, Australis Aquaculture Ltd, last week moved to increase its international production 10-fold by signing a supply agreement and management contract with Vietnam’s Nha Trang University of Fisheries.
The agreement will provide Australis with a barramundi hatchery for the production of $100 million worth of stock a year, to be exported to the US – the company’s primary export market – and Australia.
Under the agreement, the Vietnamese university will manage the breeding facility, providing technical services and high-volume supplies of stock.
Australis has also leased an offshore island, comprising 100 hectares of water and six hectares of land, where the juveniles will be grown out to adult size.
The combined output of the new hatchery and the university’s existing hatchery will be about 12.6 million juveniles per year, with capacity to produce up to 10,000 tonnes of barramundi in the same period.
Australis expects the hatchery to be operating at full capacity by 2012.
Australis chairman Stewart Graham said the company had identified a strong unmet demand from the US, which required a significant increase in production.
“We’ve spent a lot of money and three years marketing barramundi to the Americans,” he told WA Business News.
Mr Graham said the university would benefit from managing a large scale project with commercial links.
“We will be assisting with the technology in terms of the pre-fingerling stage,” he said.
“It will help them to improve efficiency in the production of juveniles.”
While barramundi is farmed throughout South Asia, from India to Taiwan, Mr Graham said Vietnam was ideally located for the project.
“Certainly, there’s a large saving financially, but more importantly it’s a large area with a water body at the proper temperature and the right profile,” he said.
“It will give us greater efficiency and a high quality (of stock) acceptable to the US market.”
Australis’s Vietnamese facility will produce about 10 times the quantity of stock that is farmed at its US-based production centre in Massachusetts.
In April, Australis announced that its US stocks could support about 1,000t of barramundi a year, following an expansion of its production facility in 2006 that nearly doubled output.
Meanwhile, Hamilton Hill-based barramundi producer Cell Aquaculture Ltd announced last month that it had fast-tracked its joint venture with a Malaysian state government to establish a 3,000 square metre production facility.
Cell Aquaculture, which signed the JV in February, said it would generate about $7 million from the deal during the initial 18-month period, with stage one expected to come online in October this year.
The facility will produce about 700t of barramundi annually once completed, with most of the stock to be exported to Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore.
Another WA barramundi company, Applecross-based Marine Produce, has recently started production at its Derby facility, although the company has no plans to expand its operations overseas.
Marine Produce managing director John Hutton said while he had been approached with regard to a project in Asia during the past month, the company was focusing on producing a locally grown regional product from its Kimberley facility.
