Shares in the majority of Norwegian salmon producers closed Tuesday trading slightly higher after the government revealed long-awaited details of its production tax on the industry.
The small uptick today on the Oslo stock exchange was a far cry from the steep fall in valuation the industry noted when the tax proposal was first announced in September last year.
"The overall conclusion from the share prices is that it is more or less as expected," Sparebank 1 analyst Knut Ivar Bakken told IntraFish.
All major companies, apart from SalMar, which saw a 1.5 percent drop, saw their share prices increase slightly.
Austevoll reported a near 0.5 percent increase, followed by Mowi with a similar increase, while Grieg Seafood and Leroy Seafood were both up 1 percent.
The majority of the non Norway-based salmon farmers and land-based salmon groups dropped, however.
Oslo-listed Bakkafrost, whose farming operations are in the Faroe Islands and Scotland, saw its shares drop 1.4 percent, while land-based groups Atlantic Sapphire and Salmon Evolution were down 0.6 percent and 0.8 percent, respectively. The land-based industry is not directly affected by the aquaculture tax.
Shares of Oslo-listed Salmones Camanchaca, which operates in Chile, were up by 1.15 percent.
The Norwegian government updated its tax proposal today, setting the effective tax rate at 35 percent, which is lower than the 40 percent proposed in the initial proposal.
At the time of the first announcement of the tax proposal last year, a total of $5.6 billion was wiped off the cumulative value of Norway's top salmon farmers.
Seafood has become an increasingly important industry on the Oslo stock exchange. Salmon farming is Norway's second-largest export industry, and the country is a world leader in the field.
