in for a good week for aus tuna industry, page-5

Yes, i am not so sure how the market will react to the farmed SBT fish as opposed to wild fish initially. Eventually if the farming is successful they will have no choice as the farmed version will be the most common, like with salmon (i have never eaten wild salmon to my knowledge). But the japs are big on marine aquaculture, they culture the most saltwater species for any country and by a long shot. Because farmed fish dietary intakes can be controlled, things like lead and mecury content can be made much lower than wild fish, and beneficial to health and flavour/texture compounds can be manipulated in the fish through the diet, such as the long chain omega threes. It takes time to develop a good diet and its a continual process (always doing research). But with this the farmed product can be consistently good and avialable year round, which is a market winner.

I dont know what there future plans are but i have a theory that they will be better off starting to sell juvenile SBT for growout in sea pens after several years of their monopoly (maybe 5 years from now), in order to slow the development of other operations. i.e. if they provide SBT juveniles then there will be less reason for competitor hatcheries to develop. This will give an alternate market and a potentially highly profitable one. I see no reason why SBT cant be grown in the northern hemisphere in similiar environments, but Australia will hopefully retain its clean green image which in high value products such as SBT is sought after (Im pretty sure for example aus abalone fetches a nice size premium over say chinese abalone, but this is only a fact i remember vaguely so dont quote me on this particular example). I think the japanese would be very keen to have a farmed source closer to home (they have a lot of interest down at port lincoln), and so they might be keen on joint ventures/royalties, but i have never done business with the japs so dont know how they would go about this.

Cheers

On another note, without the SBT operation i think CSS is grossly overvalued, but im sure everyone already knows this as do CSS. This SBT show is the company maker.