Thank you everyone for taking your time to join us on this Quarter Two presentation for Icelandic Salmon. I will now share our presentation. My name is Björn Hembre. I'm the CEO of the company, and with me today I have Edvin Aspli, who is the CFO of the company. You see the presentation now, Edvin?
Yes.
Very good. After the presentation, we will have a Q&A session. You can ask questions by raising your hand. You will then be unmuted and can give us your question. You are not able to unmute the microphone yourself. First, a brief overview of Icelandic Salmon. As most of you probably know, we are a company that is listed on the Euronext Growth Market in Oslo and on the Nasdaq First North Market in Reykjavik. The company is the sole owner and the parent company of Arnarlax ehf in Iceland, and all operational activities of the group are performed by Arnarlax ehf. We are present throughout the value chain. We have our own smolt production. We have the capacity to produce between 25,000- 30,000 tons in sea. We have our own seawater operations in the southern part of the Westfjords with a maximum allowed biomass of 23,700 tons.
All our production in sea is ASC certified, and we are operating on eight sites in three fjords in that area. We have our own harvesting plant in the Westfjords with a capacity of 30,000 tons on a yearly basis. The production there is BRC certified, which is a food safety certification. We have our own sales team that sells everything out in the global markets and also in the domestic market in Iceland. If we look at quarter two.
I'm able to change slides.
Sorry. Very sorry for this. We take a closer look at the highlights of the quarter. Quarter two was strongly affected by an accelerated harvest due to a BKD outbreak, which is a bacterial disease on our 2023 generation. This led to higher volumes than anticipated, and we ended at 4,000 ton harvest volume in the quarter.
The cost base of the 2023 generation is high due to biological challenges in quarter two, but also earlier in the production. The market price in the quarter was significantly lower than for the same period previous years. The combination of these parameters led us to an operational EBIT of €8.3 million, which gives an EBIT per kilo of negative €2.1. We expect to harvest out the 2023 generation in quarter three this year. We, on the other hand, see a good development on our 2024 generation and expect to start harvest from that early in Q4. That will be the first time we reach the maximum allowed biomass on a license of 12,200 tons in Patreksfjörður and Tálknafjörður. This is an important step toward increased harvest volumes going forward for the company.
The smolt output that is done so far this year looks promising, and we see a good biological performance on the 2025 generation. During the quarter, we did some organizational changes in key management and have implemented a financial transformation program with measures to improve financial flexibility. Both CAPEX and OPEX have been strongly reviewed, and a plan made to reduce both. In total, reduce the cost base for the company going forward. We also see a significant increase in production tax for first half 2025 compared to first half 2024. The increase is partly because of a higher tax level, but also due to higher volume, even though we see that revenues for first half 2024 were €2 million higher due to higher prices, and even though we had lower volume. I will then give the word over to you, Edvin, and take the next slide.
Thank you, and good morning, everyone. Just some brief comments on the group balance and the most important numbers there. The total assets increased by €5 million to €264 million in the quarter, and at the same time, the equity ratio went down from 55% to 47%. The biggest contributing factors there are the operating loss in the quarter, but also we had a fair value adjustment on the negative side of €9.5 million. In addition to that, we withdrew €13 million from our credit facilities. The net interest-bearing debt, excluding leasing, was around €98 million in the quarter, and available liquidity was €63 million, where the majority of that is related to our revolver facilities. If you look at the next slide, we have the changes in net interest-bearing debt. Also here, the big contribution is from the operational loss. Overall, over the quarter, it increased by €15.6 million.
Another big factor was related to new lease agreements, where the majority comes from our new Stingray lasers, which we put into operation in April. For the CapEx in the quarter, we invested around €1.2 million into the seawater operations, and also a big portion was related to our post-smolt facility, Laxey, which will be in operation this second half. Now to you, Björn.
Thank you, Edvin. I will give you an update on our license portfolio. We got a 10,000 ton license for sterile salmon in the Ísafjörður Group last year, and that was revoked by the Environmental and Natural Resources Board of Appeal. The main reasons for the revocation were due to two things. The first is that the Icelandic Food and Veterinary Authorities did not provide a comprehensive weighted assessment of the potential increased risk of spread of fish diseases and parasites. The second thing was the maritime safety for sailing in the fjord. We have reacted towards those reasons by reducing the sites so that we have a distance of five kilometers to other unrelated parties that have farming in the area and are continuously working with the authorities to look into mitigating measures for the maritime safety in the area to get a new approval for this license.
Other applications in process are we have been in quite a long time, had an application for bigger sites in Arnarfjörður. That will give us more flexibility and better MID utilization. This is still in process with the authorities. It's a bit unclear when this will be finalized. It's basically the same with our application for 4,500 tons more biomass in Arnarfjörður, which we have put through the environmental assessment, and it's under review by the authorities. There is a risk that this biomass, this 4,500 tons, might be auctioned out, but we are in a good position to take part in that with a finalized environmental assessment of that biomass. The government expressed earlier this year that they had an intention to propose a new law for Althingi in September this year. That seemed to be delayed. We don't have a clear picture.
We are hoping for a second half this year, or it might be the first half next year, according to the signals we have heard from the ministry. It is, by the way, positive that the signals from the sitting government are that they want growth in salmon farming in sea, and they want to strengthen the value creation in Iceland. Overall, the signals are positive and that they want growth in the industry, but of course, within a sustainable framework. Until the new law is in place, we and other companies, of course, operate according to the current legislation. Salmon farming has become a significant contribution to the Icelandic economy and represented 6% of the value of all goods exported from Iceland in 2024. The new law proposal will be crucial to ensure continued sustainable growth for our industry.
If we look at the sales and marketing, the market in quarter two was strongly affected by high volumes in the global supply for salmon. For the first half of 2025, the sea salmon prices for 3 kg-6 kg fish were €2.55 lower than for the same period in 2024. Our contract share was very low, 1%. This is due to that we were not planning to harvest for a period and hadn't made any contracts. As I said earlier, the harvest was initiated with the biological challenges we faced. In the quarter, we sold 12% of our salmon to the U.S. market. It's a bit early to conclude that this relative low share of volume was due to tax increase, since we also partly had a low average weight of our fish during the quarter.
The U.S. market mainly takes fish that are more than 6 kg in weight. Our average weight for the quarter was in total 4.4 kg head-on gutted. We are very concerned for the tax increase we got from the 7th of August when the taxes raised from 10% to 15%. We haven't harvested. We are in a three-week break in the harvest plant at the moment and have not sold fish with the 15% tax to the U.S. yet. We sold 9% of our volume to Asia, and both the U.S. and the Asian market have been very positive contributors to the price achievement in the last quarter. If we look a bit into the future and the outlook, we expect a decrease in our cost level from quarter four this year and going forward.
This is due to increasing volumes and lower cost out of stock from seawater on the 2024 generation that we start harvesting in October. This also means that we expect still a high cost level in quarter three while harvesting out the 2023 generation. We will continue to build biomass to optimize the MIB utilization and expect a significant increase in biomass during 2025 compared to last year. The increase in biomass from end of 2024 to 2025, end of 2025 will be significant. This is the fundament for increased volumes in 2026. Volume guiding for 2026 will be given in the quarter three presentation in November. For this year, we lowered the volume guidance from 15,000 ton to 13,000 ton, and that is mainly due to the situation we faced in quarter two with the BKD outbreak on our 2023 generation.
We expect a lower contract share for quarter three, approximately like quarter two of 1%, and for the full year, a 5% contract share. The salmon market remains uncertain on a short to medium-term level with increased global supply pressure and from tariff implications from the U.S. We do, by the way, expect year-over-year supply growth to decrease the second half of the year, and this should lead to a more normalized price level. I'm really sorry for this. I will then thank you all for listening to our presentation. I will now leave the presentation, and we move directly into the Q&A session. Please raise your hand if you have a question, and we will try to answer as good as we can. Please come with your questions.
I can open the.
Can you follow the questions that come into the chat, Edvin?
Yeah, I can read them out. There's a question here from [Ora Thurvatn]. The first one is, does the revised investment plan mean you won't be able to reach 26,000 tons of harvest?
I can answer to that. We still aim to reach the 26,000 ton of harvest in the coming years. That is still the plan, and that's not affected by the revised investments.
His second question is, is your plan to release 7 million smolts or more for 2026?
We will not release 7 million smolts in 2026. It will be at a lower level.
His third question, can you comment on the difference in mortality experienced on the 2023 generation versus the 2024 generation so far?
The 2023 generation, we had done several episodes with increased mortality, and so far we are at a, I would say, significantly lower level on the 2024 generation in total than we had on the 2023 generation at the same time last year.
Okay.
It seems to come a new question in the chat, but also feel free to use your microphone to ask questions.
Yeah, if you raise your hand, I'm able to unmute you for you to ask the question.
It seems that we had another one in the chat.
Yeah, a question from Jason Holland. Amid the U.S. tariff uncertainty, do you have plans to further diversify your markets?
The way we work in the market, we of course always try to approach good customers, and we are continuously working on getting contracts. As you see, we have a low contract share at the moment, and that means we are in the spot market with most of our fish. When we are operating in the spot market, we are basically selling to the markets that pay the best price. If the demand in the U.S. market decreases, that will basically force volumes into other markets. Asia and especially China will then be even more important for us. I hope that answered your question, Jason.
[Christopher Höglund] asks, will harvest volumes in Q3 be similar to Q2?
The harvest volumes in Q3 will be a bit lower than Q2. As I said, we are in a three-week break in the harvesting at the moment, so that our staff in the harvest plant gets a late summer vacation and we are able to handle the volume ourselves. The biological situation on the remaining 2023 generation is satisfying at the moment. That is why we decided to stop for three weeks and gain some weight before we finalize that generation.
Okay. I don't see any more questions in the chat. I'm just going to repeat myself. If you raise your hands, I'm able to unmute you if you have any further questions.
It doesn't seem to be more questions. I think we end this Q&A session. The presentation is, of course, at our homepage. That is arnarlax.is. Again, thank you for joining us, and have a great day. Bye-bye.
Thank you. Bye.