Competitive economic trends of steelhead farming in Türkiye and Norway

Economic competition of steelhead farming

Abstract

This study evaluates the competitive economic trends in respect to the production growth of Steelhead in the Norwegian and Turkish aquaculture sectors. These two countries are the leading key fish producers who supply remarkable volumes of farmed fish to satisfy the growing demand worldwide. The main two producers in this study were identified by annual production yields based on FAO statistics. Growth trends and economic performance of the key players were comparatively evaluated and superimposed with population growth from 1994 to 2021. Harvested steelhead in the Norwegian aquaculture increased 6.6-fold from 14,367 to 94,660 tons between 1994 and 2021, whereas Turkish steelhead production increased from 14,367 to 165,687 tons with nearly 23.8-fold improvement over the last 27 years. Despite superior yields achieved by Norwegian producers, which was 51.4% more than the Turkish harvest in 1994, Turkish production succeeded in catch-up in 2009, and exceeded Norwegian steelhead production by 42.9% in 2021. Nonetheless both countries attained similar economic return, Norwegian production profiting slightly higher by 1.43%. Turkish steelhead farming reaped larger volumes. Nevertheless, Norwegian yield clinched clienteles with higher price in the market, and achieved 43.7% more monetary value compared to Turkish production in 2021. This was, however, in contrary to what Turkish industry has performed in 1994, 39.2% higher profits compared to Norwegian production. A strong correlation has been noted between production and population increase in the case of Türkiye (R= 0.9577436) compared to Norway with a considerably lower correlation of R= 0.7099250 for the past 27 years. The results of this study corroborate, factors such as operational, marketing, and branding strategies other than production volume capacity play part in generating high economic value from aquaculture production as it’s been shown in this study with steelhead production, however further exploration is essential.