The year of the snake has been good to Nova Scotia so far, with an estimated million kilograms of our lobster shipped to China since the start of January to celebrate the country’s new year.
Michael Wolthers, a freight forwarder with Kintetsu World Express (Canada) Inc., said Wednesday that Chinese demand for the tasty Canadian crustaceans has eclipsed the European market.
“We had a phenomenal amount of business through January into early February shipping lobsters to China,” said Wolthers, Kintetsu’s manager for the region.
He estimates Kintetsu and four competitors have shipped a total of about a million kilograms of lobster to China already this year.
“It is at least as large as Europe at Christmas,” Wolthers said. “China is by far a bigger market than Europe is now.”
His company, which moves about 30 per cent of the province’s lobster, has already shipped about 300,000 kilograms of lobster to China this year.
“The last two weeks of January (we were shipping lobster) at a blistering pace,” Wolthers said.
“We put three trucks a week on the road, loaded with anywhere between nine and 10 tons each heading for Toronto to make connections out of Toronto on direct Air Canada flights, for the most part, to China. We were flying it out of here as much as we could. There was way more than we could. Ultimately, out of Halifax, in a containerized service, there’s four flights a week.”
He said the service out of Halifax is also Air Canada, but it’s limited to about 50 tons a week.
“It just wasn’t enough,” Wolthers said.
The truck-and-plane option still had lobsters landing in Beijing, Hong Kong and Shanghai within about 43 hours, he said.
“There’s still strong demand in China,” Wolthers said. “We’re still probably shipping close to (30,000 to 35,000 kilograms) a week to China right now.”
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