The owner of a Chinese distant-water fishing company with operations in Mauritania has said he plans have his company expand into Indonesia and Oman.
During a press conference called to coincide with the recent congress of the Communist Party of China, Fuzhou Hong Dong Fishery Chairman Lan Pingyong told reporters he was following the lead set by the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a foreign policy and developmental blueprint announced by Xi Jinping when he first took power in 2012.
Lan, who’s also a Communist Party member and deputy to the National People’s Congress, said hehis company’s fleet size had quadrupled to 170 vessels since the launch of the BRI, while a USD 230 million (EUR 229 million) investment in fish and fishmeal processing facilities in Mauritania had been profitable and made him want to expand the company’s operations abroad further.
Expansion in Indonesia has proven difficult for Chinese fishing firms due to tensions over China’s territorial ambitions in the South China Sea as well as Jakarta’s limits on foreign control of fishing licenses.
Hong Dong has received support from the municipal government of Fuzhou for the construction of an industrial park and trading center near the city’s port as part of the city’s “Fuzhou on the Sea” plan to drum up income from maritime business activity. The Fuzhou Lianjiang County International Fishery Base in Fujian province, which encompasses the Mawei port, was designated China’s third national-level distant-water processing hub in 2019. Hong Dong’s Mauritanian base is China’s largest overseas fishery base, shipping 2,500 metric tons of seafood per week to European Union and U.S. customers.
Lan, while giving journalists a tour of the site during his press briefing, said the Fuzhou trading center was receiving hairtail, squid, and tuna from the company’s logistics center in Mauritania. Lan told Xinhua in 2021 his company invested USD 300 million (EUR 290.1 million) in fishery bases abroad, and that the company more than USD 75 million (EUR 72.5 million) as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, but that his company remains viable and hopes to continue to expand.
Fuzhou Hong Dong has also made moves to further expand in West Africa and South America, with the recent completion of a fishing base in Guyana and another planned for Suriname. Lan has also discussed entrance into Oman and Angola.
Photo courtesy of Fuzhou Hong Dong Fishery
