The Russian Federal Fisheries Agency (Rosrybolovstvo) is trying again to sell investment crab quotas in an auction after its first auction failed to attract any interest.
Russia began to announce the results of a new round of crab-quota auctions in October 2023, granting rights to fish several crab species in multiple subzones in Russia. Those auctions followed months of preparation by Rosrybolovstvo, which first said it was planning the auctions in June 2023 after an initial crab-quota auctions in 2019 netted the Russian government RUB 142.4 billion (USD 16.2 million, EUR 14.9 million).
The agency held another auction on 11 July for shares of snow crab in the West Sakhalin subzone, brown king crab in the Primorye and East Sakhalin subzones, horsehair crab in the West Sakhalin subzone, golden king crab in the South Kuril zone, and blue king crab for the East Sakhalin subzone. However, none of the lots attracted bidding and the auction was declared invalid, Fishnews reported.
In response, Rosrybolovstvo reduced opening bids 10 percent to RUB 2.2 billion (USD 25 million, EUR 23.1 million), down from the original price of RUB 2.45 billion (USD 27.9 million, EUR 25.7 million). Buyers are required both to purchase the quota and to promise to build a fishing vessel at a domestic shipyard.
This isn’t the first time an auction held by Rosrybolovstvo required a redo. Back when it held its auction in October 2023, two of the lots – for catch quotas for oplio, red king, and blue crab in the North Sea of Okhotsk, as well as red king crab in the West Kamchatka and Kamchatka-Kuril subzones – were not awarded after only receiving a single bid each.
The latest failed investment quota auction also comes as the Russian government is determining whether to grant an additional two years to meet shipbuilding requirements from its first auctions. Companies that won quota in those first auctions agreed to build new fishing or crab vessels within five years, but just two years after the auctions, the country began to recognize the program was at risk due to a lack of shipbuilding capacity in Russia. Those delays were compounded with the country’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, which resulted in a number of sanctions that forced Russia to rethink its vessel maintenance and renewal efforts.
Those efforts haven’t managed to get the program back on track. Per Fishnews, of the more than 100 vessels planned to be delivered during the first five years, only 27 have been completed.
Despite the delays, Rosrybolovstvo celebrated the launch of two new vessels on 22 July. One, a small seiner dubbed Sokoch, was the second vessel built in Kamchatka. A much larger vessel, the Valentin Manturov, arrived in Murmansk and is a large trawler slated to target fish in the Northern Basin. The new vessel will fish for the Norebo Group – one of the largest fishing companies in Russia.
