Welcome everyone to Atlantic Sapphire and the Miami Bluehouse. Today we have released our annual report for 2020 and our ESG report for 2020. I'm here today with the Chief Financial Officer, Karl Øystein Øyehaug. My name is Johan Andreassen. I'm the Chairman and the CEO of Atlantic Sapphire.
Before we go over to the presentation of the operation update, the highlights from the ESG report, and the annual report, we'd like to show you a little bit of footage here from the Miami Bluehouse. We're actually standing right now in the test kitchen of the Bluehouse. We're looking forward to welcoming many of you in the future.
The phase 1 Bluehouse, which we are standing in now, is an integrated facility with a capacity of 10,000 tons of head-on gutted fish per year. We are shipping out consumer-ready filets in the other side of the building. This is by far the largest Bluehouse and land-based salmon facility in the world. Thousands and thousands of innovation hours and design hours has gone into this tremendous facility.
Let's have a look.
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We're standing here on the ground zero for phase 2. We have excavated out approximately 20 acres of land. The elevation where we're standing now is about 6 feet above sea level. Underneath us we have the Biscayne Aquifer just a few feet down, followed by the Floridan Aquifer, which we're sourcing the saltwater from, then the Boulder Zone in at 3,000 feet. The farm building for phase 2 is going to be similar in size to the phase one building, we're only building out what we call the grow out systems for medium-sized fish, from about 300 grams to 3 kilos. The life cycle is going to start in the existing phase 1 facility where we have additional capacity on the smolts, we also have additional capacity for harvest and processing.
It's going to be an integrated production plan that is going to yield out approximately 25,000 tons of salmon per year.
We expect to see the ramp up in harvest volumes from the Phase 2 facility in 2023. More details on the budget for Phase 2 and the construction timeline will be ready later this quarter. We're looking forward to share that with everyone. Yes, good morning, everyone, and good afternoon for those of you in Europe. Thank you for joining everyone. The plan for this call is to kick things off with going through a presentation, the operation update that was also shared through NewsWeb and on our webpage yesterday. Afterwards, we will open up for a Q&A session. Until that, we would ask all participants to remain muted, and at the end of the presentation, we will open up a minute or so for those who have a question to unmute.
We will take down your names and then give every one of you the chance to ask your question in due course. With that, everyone, I'd like to give you the word and kick things off today.
Thank you, Karl. Switch to the content page. Here's a brief overview of what we're going to touch upon today. We're going to start with the Q1 operational update. We're going to talk specifically about some of the challenges that we have faced. We migrate into an update on the phase 1 construction, and furthermore to the phase 2 design and construction. A few remarks on product quality and customers, and then touch upon some highlights from the ESG report and the 2020 financials. We're going to sum up and open for Q&A. Even though the outlook and the long-term value proposition for Atlantic Sapphire has never been better in our opinion, we have met some bumps in the road. The first quarter of 2021 is what I call a lost quarter. It's hard to find the highlights here. Here we are.
For the quarter, we sold our fish in the U.S. for an average of $6.80 per kilo. That is much lower than our long-term budget. The good news is that the fish that meets our superior, or 3 kilo plus, was sold for $12 a kilo, which is very strong in the current market. It's actually 90% higher than the Fish Pool commodity price for the same period. In Denmark, our price achievement is more in line with the European spot market. As you can see there, the delta between the total harvest and the superior 3-plus harvest is much less because we have less downgrades on the fish, less maturation. When we updated the market in January, we gave a heads-up that the batch 1, our frontrunner batch, had a lot of maturation. During the quarter, that batch has been harvested out and concluded.
It had even more maturation than what we anticipated at that time. Good news is the second batch that we have started to harvest now is much better and more in line with what we expect in the future, with less than 10% mature. We should expect our net revenue for total harvest to go up in the months to come. Furthermore, as you all know, we have had some huge mortality issues in the quarter, where we lost OG2. These events, plus another couple of smaller events, these events combined is making it a lost quarter, and thus a negative net biomass gain in the U.S. We harvested 420 tons in the U.S. and 300 tons in Denmark. In Denmark, we also have a disappointing biomass gain quarter.
The main reason for that is that our lead batch, that's currently taking the most of the tank volume in Denmark, had some gill issues that originates from the fresh water, where we had an incident about a year ago with the supersaturation of oxygen. These gills, which is effectively the lungs of the fish, has been impaired. They are not able to eat as much and convert the feed as much as a normal batch. That is unfortunate. We expect to harvest that batch out over the next couple of months and be back on track for steady state production, starting from the 3rd quarter. After the mortality events here in the U.S., we still have quite a lot of fish in the farm. Approximately 1.1 million fish that will be harvested for the rest of this year.
At this point, we cannot guide on how we will harvest that over the year. We want to maximize the biomass gain, playing with higher average harvest weights because we have space in the farm to grow them bigger. Also keeping an eye on having a steady supply for all our customers throughout the year. I don't know, Karl, do you have any other comments before we move on?
I think you wrapped it up well, Johan Andreassen.
Yeah. We're going to go more into details on what we have experienced in Q1. The root cause of all the issues that we are facing has to do with mechanical and non-functioning critical equipment. I can start with the first one, which is the new center drains. From the July incident of last year, we have learned that when something is off in 1 of the systems, a small % of the fish in the system will tend to die. The first mortality is dragging with it the rest of the fish in what we call a chain reaction. These center drains are designed to avoid that from happening, effectively making sure that even if we have 5% or 10% mortality, the flow in the tanks are undisrupted.
These center drains should have been in place a few months ago, due to delays related to COVID and general delays, we have not been able to install them yet, aside from in a few tanks. These are arriving here in Miami in a container next week. We are planning to install all of them by the end of this quarter. That should significantly reduce the risk of a total wipeout in a future event. Furthermore, as we have been talking about a lot of times before, it's the splitting of the systems, the growth systems, to reduce risk. We have, at this time, five out of six systems splitted. Unfortunately, the mortality in OG2 that we had in the first quarter, that happened in a system that was not yet split. That's why the impact of that specific incident was rather big.
In the quarter, we had a very big incident with our internal chiller plant that broke down. This is effectively the facility that keeps the entire farm cold. It's all the water cooling. This chiller plant has been having issues since it was commissioned more than a year ago. It's a lot of design weaknesses. It's a lot of poor workmanship into that plant. In January of this year, we experienced a large leak in a pipe, and we had to shut it off. Fortunately, we were able to commission temporary chillers to keep the fish alive and to keep the temperature down. We had a couple of weeks of disruptions in production where we had to hold back feeding and take low risk. These temporary chillers are capable of keeping the farm cold, even through the summer.
They're currently running primarily on diesel generators, but we are in the process of electrifying them to save cost. This is a clear claim that we will have towards the people that built it. Currently, we are carrying the cost of it, but we have a path to go after the appropriate people. Furthermore, in a well-functioning RAS, you need certain specific components to work. The drum filters are what I call the city walls of any RAS farm. If the city wall breaks, you're exposed. As the design of the drum filter area has not been up to par, and we have had issues with overflows of particles and feeds going into the biofilters and the treatment filters, which is not good. During the quarter, we have been modifying these drum filters to ensure that we don't have these overflows anymore.
We are in a much better position when it comes to that. The same thing goes for ozone and protein skimmers, very important component in a well-functioning RAS. These has not been working for the last year. Very lumpy at least. They have been on and off. We have engaged with an American company that is now fixing those. By the end of this month, all the ozones and protein skimmers should be running. We already spoke about batch 1 that has had problems. To sum up here, basically, construction and commissioning-related issues has caused suboptimal conditions temporarily, and effectively reduced our biomass gain and increased our cost in the quarter. That being said, we have a clear path to get out of this.
This is a temporary bump in the road, and we also know that when everything works the way it should, basically, the fish farms itself, and the systems are capable of delivering the production they are designed for. A little bit on Phase 1. We are wrapping up Phase 1. All the grow-out systems are in for fish. As I mentioned earlier, 5 out of 6 systems are completed. We currently have 1 system, OG3, that are stocked with fish that is currently not split. Until we have that done, hopefully by the end of this quarter, we will still have quite a lot of eggs in that basket. We are taking measures to reduce the risk as much as possible while we are waiting for that. Once that system is split, we do have 19 independent RAS systems in our Phase 1 Bluehouse. Yeah.
The construction of the filleting facility is completed. The facility is ready for use. We are just pending some final permits tied to the water source and the potable water quality of the water that is needed to make fillets. We expect that permit to be in place shortly. Meanwhile, we are doing third-party filleting, which is very costly. We look forward to get out of that.
In conclusion, our phase 1 completion has taken more time, but for us, the focus is definitely switching towards phase 2 now that we are really at the end of the tunnel in finalizing phase 2. Jumping to the phase 2 study, I'm going to share some thoughts on how we're looking forward.
Yeah. We're very honest that phase 1 didn't go the way we wanted. We have a tremendous amount of learnings that goes into phase 2 and beyond. We are currently on track to start construction in Q2. We have actually excavated and prepared the site already, so we have arguably started the construction, but the main construction is expected to start later in this quarter. We have elected Wharton-Smith, which is a top Southeast U.S. contractor that specializes in water treatment projects, as our general contractor. The thing is, a Bluehouse, a salmon farm like this, is very similar to a water treatment plant. Working with U.S. large companies that doesn't do anything but building water treatment plants is their bread and butter. In addition, we have engaged with Hazen and Sawyer, which is a leading U.S. engineering firm in water treatment.
We have been working with them for a year to prepare for phase 2. We are very happy with that relationship so far. Furthermore, by having this structure, Atlantic Sapphire will own its design and all the innovations created from this point on. We think that is very important in terms of creating technologies and innovations that will put us in a very good position. I also want to add that we are, as a company, in a very different position now compared to in 2000 when we started phase 1. At that time, we were only five people, full-time employees in Miami in Atlantic Sapphire, versus today we are 150. Our in-house capabilities, our learnings, our bandwidth to deal with these large projects is in a total different position.
The approach, too, will significantly reduce the risk for the site close, for poor workmanship, for delays, and for cost overruns.
I think also one thing we really want to stress there is that producing or constructing a Bluehouse facility is really not something that anyone else has done before. When it comes to different designers and construction companies, by bringing more in-house, we are confident that not only can we do this better because we are, at the end of the day, the ones with the most experience in doing both design and construction by now, but also we can secure what is going to be a big, big competitive advantage for the future, keeping more of our learnings in-house as one of our strategic advantages. This is something that we feel is a very right move for the company as we head towards 220,000 tons.
Yeah. A few remarks on the product quality and customers. Not much news here. It's basically the same as we reported last time. Our U.S. product has great taste, quality, and texture. Beyond our KPIs, vendor systems are working as designed. Furthermore, we have unmatched freshness. We are the freshest fish in the marketplace, and we have a much longer shelf life than other salmon. We still have a very solid customer pipeline. More than 10,000 stores are committed to take on the product. Obviously, we are not in 10,000 stores yet because the harvest volumes are lower. We see very good feedback from the customers and from the programs that we are currently running. Additionally, we are also working to come up with more value-added products.
We are actually about to launch our smoked salmon product, Bluehouse smoked salmon, which we are very confident is going to be a great success. We also see a very strong demand growth in the U.S. salmon market in general. Particularly since COVID, the home consumption of salmon has skyrocketed here, and as restaurants are opening up again, we think the general salmon market is going to be very strong in the U.S. for the rest of this year and also next year.
We have now released our 2020 annual report and ESG report. For the first time, Atlantic Sapphire has released those as one large integrated report, really showcasing that we as a company see ESG risks and opportunities fully integrated also with our long-term financial performance. Here you can dive deeper into what our ESG risks and opportunities are in our materiality matrix, where we dive into all of this and try to illustrate a little bit more in detail what we're doing and why we think this is the right way to approach salmon. Jumping to the financials for 2020, I will give you some highlights as well. If you look at 2020, the full year in US dollars, we had revenue in Denmark of $5 million.
2020 in Denmark was a year that was characterized by a lot of months of building up biomass after we had an incident in February of 2020. The revenue was quite back-end loaded in the year. As Johan has touched upon in one of the first slides, we have been working in Denmark with a very positive trend of building up a strong premium. As you remember, the Danish fish has historically, to a large extent, been sold to the U.S. market, where it has fetched a big premium, while we have not spent that much time and resources on developing a premium product in Europe. That work is now fully ongoing and on track, and we're very excited about seeing where this will end.
We definitely think that due to the fantastic product quality and the unique story, the Danish fish, just like the U.S. one, is going to be a premium product. U.S., on the revenue side for 2020, is marked by a year where we really started harvest in the fourth quarter, slowly ramping up volumes. Price achievement was good, as we've talked about before, but of course, not enormous volumes. Here we expect more for 2021 and beyond, of course. On a consolidated basis, group revenue was $6.3 million for 2020. Looking at EBITDA, pre fair market value adjustments, we ended up at negative $6.4 million in 2020. In the U.S., we ended up at $22.9 million negative EBITDA for the year, bringing the consolidated group level to negative $30.4 million.
Especially on the U.S., the EBITDA, which is production cost related, is characterized by all the fish that was harvested in Q4 being from batch 1. Batch 1 has a higher cost level. First of all, due to the fact that with the maturation issues that fish faced, it did have, on a relative basis, a higher cost of production, lower feed conversion ratio, lower biomass gain. Also, what's very important to notice, batch 1, which has been the leading batch throughout its cycle, has always been the biggest part of the farm's biomass, therefore also taking the biggest chunk of fixed cost. Batch 1 reported EBITDA cost is going to be very, very high for the first batch, and then it will gradually decline as we get towards steady state production and you get steady state biomass to divide all the fixed cost of this operation between.
As you know, our business is, to a very large extent, a fixed cost business where arguably only feed is the really true variable cost. Therefore, at the end of the day, it's all about biomass gain. Jumping to the balance sheet, our total assets as of the end of the year were NOK 321 million. We had total liabilities of NOK 65.5 million. Depreciation amounted to NOK 6.7 million, with the biggest chunk being in the U.S., where we started depreciating. CapEx for the year ended up at NOK 64.5 million, with a little bit of Phase 1 CapEx left in 2021. The big CapEx commitments going forward all are going to be related to our Phase 2 construction. On the cash flow level, on a consolidated basis, we have cash flow from operating activities of negative NOK 47 million. We invested NOK 61 million in cash flow from investing activities.
Lastly, on the financing side, had the $112 million on the positive end. Jumping to the summaries slide. Q1 2021 was characterized by some issues with operational performance and the GA Index due to construction related challenges that we've tried to give you as much detail as we can about in this presentation. The three headlines for Q1 are the chiller plant breakdown, the March 23rd incident where we lost fish, and lastly, the issues with the main lead batch in Q4, Q1 2021, batch one, having maturation issues, which led to a lower performance. However, we are very clear that these are temporary issues that we do not expect to see in the future. Strengthen the organization is a very important topic to us across all layers of the organization.
We've added more competence, structured the company in a better way to ensure we're not only perfectly positioned to deliver Phase 1, but also we're in the starting point for Phase 2 and beyond, and have an organization that is ready to continue the growth story. Our stock systems, when operating as designed, are performing well. We're seeing good performance on GA Index, which, back on the comment about what's important on the cost side, is biomass gain, hence our focus on GA Index. When we also in Q1 have had parts of the farm, independent systems that have been running well, we're seeing that as long as the water quality is good enough, the fish is delivering its job. It's all about getting that infrastructure up and running, and then we will deliver on our budget. COVID-19, of course, we cannot avoid mentioning it.
It remains an operational impact that does cause some issues, especially on the construction side when it comes to doing our punch list work. We're very happy to see that here in the U.S., vaccines are being rolled out, our employees are healthy, and we can hope to continue to see a positive trend there throughout 2021. Phase Two, as Johan mentioned, we are actually arguably had the first spade in the ground with clearing of the land. We're very excited to get starting there and are on track for Phase Two construction. Lastly, stable retail prices for Bluehouse Salmon has been the case since we started harvest, and we expect it to remain the case going forward based on very positive feedback, both from end consumers and from our buyers.
Lastly, looking at a few milestones beyond what is pure operations, U.S. Phase 2 design and CapEx budget is going to be one important data point for us, knowing exactly what CapEx commitments we have in the future, but also the timeline of when we really can expect to see the ramp up of Phase 2 harvest volumes, sometime in 2023. We do expect full construction start now in the second quarter. The advanced plan for our current 160 acres of land, what we in turn referred to as the grand master plan, should also be ready before the summer. That's also something we are very much looking forward to sharing with the market. Unless you have something to add, Johan Andreassen?
No, I think you wrapped it up very well, Karl. We should jump into Q&A, right?
I want to thank you all, of course, for your attention on the presentation. I will just take you quickly through how we were thinking about conducting the Q&A session. What we will do is we will open up for around a minute or so for everyone who's interested in asking a question to unmute themselves, if you're calling in through the phone, by pressing star six, if you're on the Teams app, by simply unmuting yourself with the mute button. State your name. I will put them down in the order I receive the names, then give each one of you the word one by one. I'll also allow for one more round at the end to see if there are any questions that have popped up while we were doing the Q&A.
Please go ahead, unmute yourself, and state your name if you have a question. Hamish here with Sapphire. Thanks, Karl. Hamish, noted.
Alexander Jones, Bank of America.
Excuse me, could you repeat your name please? It was a little bit unclear.
Yeah. Alexander Jones, Bank of America.
Hey, Alex. Noted. Are there any more questions before we jump to the 2 I have written down?
This is Ort Chen from Social Capital.
Ort, I have your name. Thank you.
Thanks, Karl.
Very good. I think we'll start with the questions, and as I mentioned, I'll give everyone a chance again later to ask a question as well in a second round. I would like to first give the word to Anders from IntraFish .
Hi. I just wonder, Wille, will Billund Aquaculture be involved in phase two in a way?
I think, if I heard you correctly, Anders, your question was if Billund Aquaculture will be involved in phase 2.
Right. The answer to that is no. If they do, it will be in a much smaller scope than in phase one, but currently that's not the plan. Thank you. I also wonder if you know how much. That we cannot comment on at this time, Anders. Okay, thanks.
Very good. Next up we have Alexander Jones from Bank of America. Alex, please go ahead.
Great. Thank you. First of a couple of questions would be on the Danish incident. Is this something that you think would be repeatable in the U.S., i.e., are you worried about it elsewhere, or is it specific to the design and the water that you're using there that you don't think it's a issue we should think about for Miami?
Are you referring to the incident of 2020 in February?
No, I'm sorry, the fish gill quality issues this quarter.
Okay. Yeah.
It's a good question. Let me put it this way. The risk factors in land-based are different from sea-based, right? In sea-based, you have issues with sea lice, viruses, bacteria, algae blooms, bad weather, and so forth. In land-based, you don't have those. What you have in land-based is a lot of factors tied to mechanical equipment that needs to work. As a matter of fact, one of the big risk factors that needs to be managed is gases. Gases is a big topic, whether it's oxygen levels, CO2 levels, H2S levels, nitrogen levels, and so forth. Gill health and making sure you have control of gases is definitely something that is very crucial for land-based farms in general. Can we have issues tied to supersaturation of oxygen in the future? Yeah, we can, but it's something that can be managed.
The issue in Denmark is our smolt facility is rather old. We have done some upgrades to it to make sure it's more stable. As an analyst or as an investor, I think to understand that gases are important in land-based is very important.
Great. Thank you. The second question would be on the U.S. Would it be fair to say that by the third quarter, you would expect to be close to steady state on biomass gain per quarter, if not on total biomass levels? In other words, are there other issues that you expect to continue to drag on into the third quarter, or are the ones that you've listed the key ones we should worry and think about?
I think the way to look at this is that we have north of 1 million fish that is going to be harvested for the rest of this year. Currently, we are working on the detailed plan on how we're going to harvest it. The plan is to temporarily harvest larger size fish than what we have in the long-term business plan, just because we have a lower number of fish and we have space for them in the tanks. Arguably, the second quarter is going to have a slightly lower harvest than Q3 and Q4. We are very focused on making sure that we can harvest every week the rest of the year to make sure our customers get stable supply. Once we get into 2022, we expect to be up to what I call more or less normal run rates, phase 1.
I can also add one comment there to your point on why we expect somewhat lower harvest volumes in Q2. That is for the simple fact that we will focus in Q2 on getting our standing biomass in the farm up as quickly as possible so that we, for the rest of the year, can maximize the growth on that fish. It's somewhat, I think a little bit to your point, Alexander Jones, in the question, yes, we will be much more of a steady state operation in the second half than in Q2 when it's still focused on getting as quickly as possible to full utilization of our tank volume.
Okay. That's great. Maybe just one final one, if I may, on the press reports a couple of days ago around a hospitalization of a couple of your employees or contractors. Could you just comment on that in terms of what happened, whether it is repeatable, and how that situation has evolved? Thank you.
Sure. These three workers in subject, they are part of a team from one of our subcontractors that are doing industrial cleaning in the farm. We have been working with them for a couple of years now. They were doing routine cleaning in the bottom of one of our grow out tanks, when one of them actually took off his mask and was exposed to, we don't know if it was lower oxygen or if it was some kind of gas, but basically he fainted and the two other guys came to help him, right? We called 911, and we got the first responders on site. They were taken out of the facility promptly and take it to hospital for a checkup.
Two of them were already out of the hospital as of last night, and the last report that we have is that the third person is doing well as well. He's doing better, so hopefully he's going to recover soon. Yeah, it's just a reminder that when we have safety procedures here, they are to be followed. Unfortunate event. One accident is one too many, but it looks like these people are going to be fine.
Excellent. Thank you very much.
Thanks, Alex. I would like to give the word to Ort Chen, please.
Hey, guys. Just hoping you could help me better understand how the maturation issues work. What were those issues, and what can you do to prevent those issues going forward?
Sure. In Atlantic Sapphire, we haven't had issues with maturation the last, I would say four-five years. This is something that we know what needs to be done to prevent. Basically, every animal has a need to reproduce. When an animal is exposed to stressors, it can be a wide range of stressors, it says, "Hey, I need to mature to reproduce before it's too late." That's the general comment. These stressors can be everything from temperature fluctuations. It can be noise. It can be particles in the water. Whatever it is that triggers them to go to maturation. In addition, batch 1 here was co-located with a because we are running all females. All the fish in our farms are female fish.
That is also one mitigant to avoid maturation, because if you have female fish and male fish in the same system, hormones from the male fish goes and triggers the females to mature. Batch 1 was stocked together with another batch of mixed sex fish the first year of the life. They were actually exposed to some of these hormones, which is not the normal course of business. It's a lot of factors that affects maturation, but this is nothing that we think is going to be an issue for us going forward. We know how to manage it, but we also know that due to all the construction issues we have had, where we have had the temperature fluctuations, we have had particles in the water, and so forth, that's the reason why Batch 1 was maturing to the extent that it was.
Yeah. Just important to repeat that when we look at the next batch 2, which we in fact have been harvesting since March, we do not see the same problem. Just to support why we really don't see this as a long-term issue for us.
Great. Thank you, guys.
Thanks, Or Chen. Very good. Those were the three initial questions I had on my list. I will now open up again. If anyone, over the next one minute, raises their name, I'll give you the chance to ask a question. I'll give everyone one minute to let me know.
Christian Nordby.
Christian? Thank you.
Anders Furuseth.
Anders again. Thank you.
Mads Ingier.
Written. Mads, perfect. Very good. Sounds like those were the three questions. I would like to start with giving the word to Christian. Christian, please go ahead.
Thank you. I know you said you will come with a plan ahead of the summer, but I wondered in terms of CapEx distribution, at least for phase two, will it be very even, or will it be front-end or back-end loaded? How do you see that?
We can comment based on what we've seen in phase one. In phase one, you typically see that you start quite slow on the CapEx side because a lot of work has to be completed, and before you really see the large builds come in. You can probably expect it to be quite slow on the cash flow side in the start, and then have a high peak that lasts a while, and then just towards the end, you see the decline as more and more of the phase two growth systems are completed. We will know more and share more details as soon as we've fully finalized our phase two budget and timeline.
Thank you.
You're welcome. Anders Furuseth from IntraFish, please go ahead with your question.
Are you going to release equity to fund phase II?
Well, first of all, I would say that we, of course, cannot comment directly on that for obvious reasons. We can, of course, share some general comments, and that is that Atlantic Sapphire, as a company, of course, has access to several sources of financing all the time. Things like bank. We have very supportive banks in place. There is the bond market, and there is an equity market. Everything is available. What is very important for us to stress here is that before we know the phase 2 CapEx figure, which is by far the largest liquidity input into our financial model, it doesn't make any sense to make any comments on that. I think we can come back and have a better discussion around phase 2 financing once we know what phase 2 is actually going to cost.
Anders Furuseth, I hope that answers your question at least to an extent.
Yeah. Thanks.
Thanks, Hamish. Lastly, I have Mads Ingier. Mads, please go ahead.
Hello. You said earlier that you have about 1 million fish that you expect to harvest the rest of the year in the U.S. Does that mean we can expect 3,000-4,000 tons of total harvest in 2021?
No. As I said, because we have space in the farm, we expect to run that fish larger. We are still doing the details on that. Between 5.5 and 6.5 kg round weight should be. Yeah, you can make your estimates based on that.
One more thing. Last year, you experienced some troubles due to noise and vibration during construction. Now that you start construction of phase 2, are you confident that you can avoid similar incidents?
Yes. Phase 2 is going to be built in a different building, right? We are actually starting to introduce eggs into the current phase 1 for phase 2 purposes just after the summer, in August, September. The fish will stay there in phase 1 until phase 2 is ready for fish. We are not going to be in the same situation as we have been in phase 1, where we are doing heavy duty construction works at the same time as we're raising fish. We are taking measures to avoid compromising the fish and exposing the fish to that kind of work.
Okay. I can add one more question. Well, most of these maturity issues has been for batch 1, is what I understand. Are you through harvesting batch 1, or are you still on batch 1?
Yeah, we're done with batch 1. It was concluded in March. We are into batch 2 now. As I mentioned earlier, batch 2 looks much better, with less than 10% maturation so far. It's a dramatic improvement from 1 batch to the other.
Mm-hmm. Okay. Well, thank you.
You're welcome.
Thank you. Unless we have someone jumping in here, we have been through two rounds of questions. I'll give 10 seconds if there's a last one. If not, we'll conclude the call. Sounds like there is no other urgent question. Of course, we're always available one-to-one also, if there's anything that pops up later. I can say also that the video we wanted to share with you in the start, we will make it available. Not sure what technical issues caused it to not have sound, as we saw some of you commented on in the chat here. We'll make sure that that becomes available there. You'll get some more footage from not only inside the phase 1 Bluehouse, but also from the ground of phase 2. Hoping that will give some perspective of what we have ahead here.
Jon, would you like to wrap up the call?
Sure. I was just thinking to give you guys some food for thought. Every time that you have a mortality event in a land-based farm, it reaches the headlines of all the newspapers, right? Which is understandable. It's a very dramatic event, and it's something that we are attacking to prevent happening in the future and at least dramatically reduce the magnitudes of these events. I just want to put it into perspective. If you look at the Norwegian and Chilean salmon industry, they are averaging approximately 20% mortality in the seawater phase, and has been doing that for years.
When I looked into our own production data from the beginning of days in Atlantic Sapphire back to 2011 up until today, including all the big hiccups that we have had and the mass mortalities we have had, we are about 30% mortality, compared to the 20% in net pens. We are a novel industry. We should not forget that. What we are doing has never been done before, and we have means to reduce and hopefully minimize mortality events in the future. I just want people to put this in context. The reason why the mortality rates in net pen farms doesn't reach the headlines is because they are constantly high. You don't have these dramatic peaks, so it's kind of disappearing as a day-to-day and week-to-week and month-to-month mortality. In a land-based farm, you don't see any winter sores.
You don't see any fish with sore downgrades. The skin is perfect. The only reason for downgrades that we have is maturation. Keep that in mind. We are very disappointed in the short term, but nothing has changed in the long term. If it has changed, it has arguably changed for the better. I just want to give that appeal before we conclude the call.
Very good. Thanks everyone for joining.
Thank you.