Scientific, Technical and Economic Committee for Fisheries : the economic performance of the EU fish processing industry (STECF-14-21)

The 2014 Economic Report on the European Union (EU) fish processing industry provides a comprehensive overview of the latest information available on the structure and economic performance of the sector. The report has been produced by fisheries economists from the JRC and a group of economic experts convened under the Scientific, Technical and Economic Committee for Fisheries (STECF). The data used to compile all the various analyses contained within the report were collected under the frameworks of the data collection framework (DCF). The fish processing sector in the EU had appr. 3,500 companies with fish processing as main activity that accounted for around 27.9 billion Euros of turnover and more than 6.4 billion Euros of Gross Added Value (GVA) in 2012. The fish processing industry provided employment to around 120 thousand people in the whole of Europe. The available data suggests an improvement of the economic performance over the years. In 2012 GVA and net profit generated by the fish processing industry (for which data exists) were respectively 17% and 83% higher than in 2008. Compared to 2011, however, both indicators fell significantly (-3% GVA and -5% net profit). However, there are differences between countries as some report improving indicators while others report decreasing numbers. On a first look at 2013/14 compared to 2011/12 many experts report a similar development, in some countries the situation improved in others not. The high dependency on imports from foreign countries will continue to leave the companies very vulnerable to developments on the world markets. The sector suffers also from very low margins which continue to decrease due to increasing energy costs that cannot be translated easily into price increases due to the high negotiation power of the retail sector. The fish processing companies in many countries seem not to be more efficient than previous years in its ability to react to increasing costs. They report increasing total costs while at the same time income only increases slightly. However, in a lot of countries there are positive expectations given that total assets are higher than debt. The STECF reviewed the report during its plenary meeting in November 2014.