Sino Agro Food (SIAF), creators of the defunct Chinese land-based shrimp farm known as "megafarm" have suffered another major loss with their Tri-way operations, according to their latest financial report filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
The company, which owns a little over a third of Tri-way, said in a financial report the COVID-19 pandemic caused all of its fish being raised in Tri-way's farms to die in 2020, resulting in a "complete write off" for its Aquafarm 1 facility, where it is raising the tropical marine species Pearl Grouper, as well as at its Aquafarm 2 site, where it is raising the Malaysian fish Empurau. The loss also applied to Aquafarm 3, where the company raises post larvae of giant freshwater prawn.
The company said it lost over $77 million (€64.5 million) for the fiscal year of 2020, "causing all farms to stop work for over 7 months without sufficient workers, feed, supplementary, medications, transportation and maintenances."
All of the stocks died during this time period, and the company estimates it will cost over $80 million (€67 million) in capital expenditures and working capital and two years to replace the live stocks and to bring the fishery to operational revenue achieved in 2019.
"Currently Tri-way is in a very poor financial situation as such it is not practically possible for Tri-way to revitalize and to rebuild its operations in a hurry but to reduce its operations and to concentrate its efforts on rebuilding of brood stocks, the production of fingerling and nursery stocks and repairing the damages etc," the company said. "It is anticipating that under current conditions, Tri-way will take a long period to recovery."
The Chinese agriculture technology and organic food company broke ground on its gigantic 300,000-metric ton recirculation aquaculture system (RAS) vannamei farm in Zhongshan China in 2014, saying it would reach maximum capacity by 2025.
That operation ceased in 2019, "failing the company’s original ambition to become one of the biggest prawn producers in the world by year end of 2024."
In October of 2020, the CEO of SIAF was forced to relinquish some control of his company after minority shareholders won a long-fought court battle against the business and its owners.
