Iceland fish firm’s profits down

HB Grandi, Iceland’s second largest fishing and fish processing company, has announced reduced revenues and operating profits for the first nine months of this year.
Income for the period totalled €149.2 million (£132.7 million) compared to €158 million (£141 million) in the previous year.
The EBITDA was €24.1 million (£21.4 million), which represents about 16.2 per cent of operating revenue, but was down by just over eight million euros on 2017.
Operating income during the third quarter of 2018 (July to September) fell from €62 million (£55 million) to €49.2 million (£44 million)
HB Grandi, which has been investing heavily in fleet modernisation, owns eight trawlers and has a sizeable quota of 36,000 tonnes of bottom fish (mostly cod and haddock) and 97,000 tonnes of pelagic fish (mackerel, herring and blue whiting).
Its assets currently total €533 million. Two weeks ago it was given the go-ahead to purchase the fishing company Ogurvik (formerly Brim), which owns one freezer trawler with a sizeable quota.
And it has recently undergone a change of ownership and a structural reorganisation which, it says, will lead to a simpler way of working, with an increased emphasis on its core activities of deep sea fishing and fish processing.
However, there have been redundancies at one of its processing centres. HB Grandi processes and sells much of the fish caught by its fleet and has major white fish customers in the UK.