The record harvest of Alaska pink salmon last season continues to make its way through the marketplace, but an executive at one of the big market players says the glut of fish is not a problem heading into the 2014 season.
“Pink salmon last year was the biggest in history and prices stayed high. They never came down the entire season. I thought it was strange what was going on and nervous about what would happen but so far things are selling OK. The value is holding,” the executive said. “There has been a little, very moderate, decline in prices, but nothing like you might expect based on the volumes.”
What does this all mean? There is a market for pinks, a definite industrial niche for it, the executive said. “Also it tells me that it doesn’t change the salmon universe,” he said. “We can only have a certain limited effect. Alaskans don’t want to hear that we don’t control the world, but we don’t.”
Because pinks are a two-year fish — the harvests are always much higher in odd-numbered years — the 2013 bonanza won’t be as hard to sell off. “That was more than a year’s volume, but that’s OK, because if you look at the projection for this upcoming year, by the time 2015 comes around, both years will have flushed through,” the executive said. “It just means we have more of our fish tied up with our banks.”
While there is some difficulty in holding on to inventory for longer than they would like to, the Alaska industry will be able to handle it. “I think part of the reason prices have held up given these big volumes is that there’s no weak players in the industry who would have some kind of desperate straits and need immediate cash flow so they would drop the price,” the executive said. “The companies that are left are in this business are in it in a big way and tend to be stable companies who can handle the additional burden on their cash flow.”
As for sockeyes, the executive says he only wishes they were more of them to sell. “We could sell them over three times what we could get. We’ve worked so hard to build this demand, and now it’s gone way beyond what we can get,” he said.
That said, one East Coast supplier said there is a “certain amount of slumping” going on with Alaska salmon, with “inventories not moving as people had estimated. I am seeing prices for sockeyes starting to fall back.” Mid-March prices for wild frozen H&G gillnet-caught sockeye were in the low-USD 4 (EUR 2.88) range to more than USD 4.60 (EUR 3.32) a pound depending on size of the fish. Gillnet-caught chums were selling for the upper-USD 1 (EUR 0.72) to low-USD 2 (EUR 1.44) range. Frozen chum fillets and portions were going for between USD 2.75 (EUR 1.98) and USD 3 (EUR 2.16).
The preliminary forecast is out for the Copper River, with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game estimating the number of Copper River kings at 33,000 and sockeye at 1.8 million. The sockeye estimate is above the Copper River catch average of between 1 million and 1.2 million.
