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France has been a pioneer in marine fish culture, especially in the field of hatchery techniques. For some species, French hatcheries have maintained a high efficiency and competitive positions from the early days, despite recognized high labour costs and small internal markets in France.
Economic data were gathered to illustrate the production cost structure of juveniles. Relative costs are compared on 5 species and from 5 French specialized hatcheries each working on a single species (turbot, bream, bass, sturgeon and trout for fresh water references).
Costs have been expressed as a percentage of total production cost, excluding only financial costs, these differing too much in relation to capital and debts structure of the different companies.
The cost structure is not very different from one species to another and obviously, labour costs are highly dominating. Depreciation is the second single cost in marine hatcheries, showing that modern hatcheries need continuing investments. No other single cost weighs significantly.
The author intends to highlight research and development strategies and requirements in relation with the optimization of cost structure.
No research result is efficient if it doesn’t bring immediate progress in labour productivity. Internal research is preferred to protect the team’s know how often considered as the first competitive value of the company.
Unless taken as a worldwide market, hatcheries only represent a small turnover for their suppliers, and this doesn’t help in financing research on species related feed, vaccines, etc…
Automatisation of parts of the process is a permanent goal in hatcheries and no research institute in the field is available for help.
Group research between companies working the same market is difficult as competition is strong. However some efficient research can be run between companies working on different species. The genetic field is one such field.
Being mostly capitalistic and labour intensive, the hatcheries do not remain small. They have to look into economies of scale to remain competitive. They often belong to groups, thus failing to qualify for the SME related funds for research.
Didier Leclercq is managing director of FRANCE TURBOT SAS, which is a French company, specialized in Turbot juveniles’ production, since 1988. The company is based in western France but also operates a turbot hatchery recently built in Spain (ALROGAL SA in Galicia).Born in 1959, married, 4 children.
Contact details:dleclercq@franceturbot.fr
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