Chinese distant water fishing company Shanghai Kaichuang Marine International has agreed to sell factory trawler vessel Kai Yu to a Russian fishing company for $24.5 million, the company said.
According to a company filing at the Shenzhen stock exchange, Shanghai Kaichuang inked the deal with Russian firm Mintay DV, a subsidiary of Sigma Marine Technology, a firm based in Russia’s Far East.
Kai Yu is 105 meters long, has a beam of 20m, and a gross tonnage of 7,671 tons. Built in 1992, it was acquired by Shanghai Kaichuang in 2006 and used to fish horse mackerel, which it then mainly sold to Nigeria.
According to Shanghai Kaichuang, in recent years Nigerian demand for horse mackerel has declined, while the pandemic has impacted fishing operations, such as ship maintenance, fish transportation and unloading catch.
Given its age “there are risks of high maintenance costs and high safety hazards”, said the firm.
The original value of the vessel is given as CNY 128m ($19.58m) while it retains a salvage value of CNY 6.4m, it said.
The firm said it would deliver the vessel to an anchorage in Dalian, China, by March 19, 2021 at the latest.
Far East Russian firm
Little is known about Maxim Petrushin and Sergey Popov, who Forbes reported own Sigma, Sofco and Tralflot, which have sales of RUB 14 billion ($223.9m).
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Petrushin and Popov’s companies fish in the Far East, catching mackerel and iwashi, or Pacific sardines, in the economic zone of Japan. Sigma also owns about 7,600 metric tons of crab quota.
According to its website, Sigma also owns the super-trawler MRKT “Petr I”. Acquired in 2016, the vessel is used to catch Pacific mackerel, Pacific sardine iwashi, and Pacific herring, and has an estimated daily output of 400-450t of finished products.
In 2017, the company modernized and refitted MRKT “Petr I” so that it could also produce fishmeal from fish waste.
