The European Commission Wednesday cleared the merger of fish farming activities of Dutch food giant Nutreco and Luxembourg’s Stolt-Nielsen creating a new entity that will control 24 percent of the world farmed salmon market.

Nutreco Holding N.V. will own 75 percent of the new company, called Marine Harvest, and Stolt will own 25 percent. Sales of the combined company were recently revised from 1 billion (US$1.3 billion) to 850 million ($1 billion).

Frank van Ooijen, Nutreco’s director of corporate communications, told The Wave on Wednesday the deal should be finalized within a few weeks. The two firms signed an agreement in September to merge.

“Then, of course, we get the official disentanglement of our Marine Harvest from the Nutreco organization,” he said.

The new Marine Harvest, headed by CEO Hans den Bieman, will be based in Amersfoort, Netherlands and employ over 6,000 employees, two-thirds of them coming from Nutreco. The species sold will include salmon, cod, halibut, sturgeon, tilapia, barramundi and yellowtail.

“Then there’s the integration process,” van Ooijen said. “That will consume, of course, quite a lot of time.”

Months, he said. Marine Harvest said earlier, following the integration process, it intends to pursue an initial public offering (IPO) of stock.

Meanwhile, Nutreco has its own in-house restructuring to take care of “once we have said goodbye to our old Marine Harvest, which means about 4,000 people leaving our company,” van Ooijen said.

Nutreco plans to say more about its restructuring plan, called “Rebalancing for Growth," where it pledges to focus more on the company’s animal nutrition and fish feed businesses, following the official spinoff of its Marine Harvest division into a stand-alone firm.

The deal will leave Nutreco with about 8,000 employees, give or take a few hundred. Van Ooijen couldn’t comment on potential layoffs as a result of the merger.

The EC, the executive arm of the European Union, said the joint venture posed no “serious competition concerns” since the market shares of both firms are “moderate” and the fragmented nature of the farmed salmon market was active with other international, “significant competitors.”

Van Ooijen agrees. The new firm’s competition is all the “other international, and local salmon farming companies in Norway.”

The EC said the new entity “will be the most important player” in the European economic area. In addition, the EC said the "existing vertical relationship between the joint venture and Nutreco, regarding the Norwegian and UK market for aqua feed for farmed salmon, will not lead to any risk of other companies being excluded from the market."

Regarding an imminent decision by EU regulators to impose minimum import prices on Norwegian salmon exported to EU member, Van Ooijen had no comment.

“We are just waiting for the final solution coming out of Brussels,” he said.

Nutreco, Stolt merger gets legal approval; 'new' Marine Harvest to control 24% of world salmon market