Hello. Welcome to Lerøy Seafood Group's fourth quarter presentation 2020. My name is Henning Beltestad. I'm the CEO of Lerøy Seafood Group, and with me today I have Sjur Malm, CFO. Yes. First of all, I want to show this fantastic value chain that Lerøy represent today. A fully integrated company of red fish and white fish. This gives us a unique opportunity, and it's not many companies like Lerøy in the world today. For 20 years, we invested heavily in the whole value chain. In Farming, in fisheries, in processing, building smolt facilities, building VAP activities, distribution centers, and fish cuts, and delivering our products all the way to the end customer. Our goal is to create the world's most efficient and sustainable value chain for seafood. We will make it happen, I promise.
We have a huge potential of improvements, but I'm sure with our 5,000 employees, we will reach this goal. 2020, a challenging year, but still only a small dip in the turnover. Close to NOK 20 billion compared to a little bit lower than 2019. We see going all the way back to 1990, we see that we have had a very good development in the group. We will go to fourth quarter. First of all, I will take you through the highlights, then Sjur will take us through the key financial figures, and then I will come back and talk a little bit about the outlook supply and demand of seafood. Yeah. We start with the highlights. At Lerøy Seafood Group, we report in three segments: Farming, Wild Catch and VAP, Sales & Distribution.
Fourth quarter, we had an EBIT before fair value adjustment of NOK 441 million. We have an EBIT per kilo all inclusive that excluded wild catch of NOK 9.3. Of course, this quarter we've been affected by prices of both whitefish and red fish because of the very special situation that we have had in 2020. We have not had ability to sell through one of our channels, the HoReCa, which has been very difficult for the whole industry, of course. Yeah. If we look a little bit forward, going forward, we expect to harvest about 205,000 tonnes-210,000 tonnes of salmon and trout in 2021, including our 50% share of Scottish Sea Farms. We have potential for further growth beyond this going forward. We expect a white fish volume of around 73,000 tonnes. If we look at the volumes in fourth quarter, we had 48,300 tonnes.
We catched 12,600 tonnes, and we had a revenue of NOK 5.2 billion. Farming. Like I said, it's been challenging. The prices this quarter is the lowest price in a quarter that we have seen since, I think 2015. Compared to fourth quarter last year, it's NOK 13 down. We had a price of 56, and it's NOK 4 down compared to third quarter. For us to have a good result, even though with extremely low prices, is good to see. We also see that the trout market is more in balance than earlier quarters, and this trend is also continuing into 2021. We now face prices for trout that is higher than the salmon. That's good.
Now we had a contract share of 33% in fourth quarter, and the cost is down like we also indicated in our last presentation. The EBIT per kilo in Farming is NOK 6.1 compared to NOK 14 in 2019. For the Farming volumes, the guiding, yeah, 2020, we achieved 35,000 tonnes in Lerøy Aurora, 67,900 in Lerøy Midt, and 68,000 tonnes in Lerøy Sjøtroll. A total of close to 171,000 tonnes. When we presented a guiding for 2020 in November 2019, we guided 172,000 tonnes. We are very close to what we said all the way back in November 2019. Norskott Havbruk achieved 24,000 tonnes, and our share is 12,000 tonnes. A total of 182,900 tonnes.
For this year, we see 47,000 tonne in Lerøy Aurora, 70,000 tonne in Lerøy Midt, 75,000 tonne in Lerøy Sjøtroll, and a total of 192,000 tonne in Norway. We also see that Scottish Sea Farms is increasing their volume up to 36,000 tonnes and our share then 18,000 tonnes. A total of 210,000 tonnes, which is close to 30,000 tonne increase in volume for 2021. If we look at the wild catch, challenging quarter. We had a very good start in 2020, but the last three quarters has been very difficult for the whitefish. One of the main reasons is that a large share of our volumes in whitefish is going into the HoReCa channel. The prices is also affected in whitefish. If we look at total, we have NOK 205 million in EBIT compared to NOK 293 million EBIT in 2019.
I will say in total, this is acceptable, I will say that we have performed relatively good in a very difficult year. If we look at the volumes in our fish and split on volumes, we have 7,000 tonne cod, 2,000 tonne saithe, 1,000 tonne haddock, and a total of 12,600 tonne. We have VAP, Sales & Distribution, and it's been very good to see the way that this part of the value chain has handled a very difficult situation, holding the value chain open and keeping a very high service level towards our customers all over the world and delivering high quality and stable volumes the whole year. The result of this segment is very good, NOK 176 million compared to NOK 162 million in fourth quarter 2019.
We still have a lot of potential to take out of this part of the value chain, a lot of capacities, and we think that we are able to take out this potential going forward. Sjur. He will take us through the key financial figures.
Thank you, Henning. We've invested a lot downstream over the recent decades. This year has been a demanding year in many respect. We believe that those long-term investments in a vertical integrated value chain and a high customer focus is proving profitable in such a demanding year as 2020 has been. We believe this supports our business model and our strategy. Looking into the numbers, Henning has already talked us through the key figures. Here you can see key drivers. When looking at salmon and trout, we harvested a larger volume this year compared to last year. The profitability per kilo is reduced, and cost is also reduced, so that profitability per kilo is reduced due to price achievement. Looking into the Wild Catch segment, that reduction in profitability per kilo is also related to price realization.
In sum then our operating number, our operating profit is NOK 441 million, down from last year, driven by price effects. In light of those price effects, it's positive to see that revenue is only down 1%, and that indicates a very high activity level through the value chain also in this quarter. Income from associates is a little bit up. I'll return to the largest asset. We have a profitability per share of NOK 0.62 down from last year. Looking at 2020 as a whole, we find many of the same drivers as in Q4. We have seen a substantial increase in harvested volume in red fish, and beyond that, the standing biomass, meaning the amount of live fish in sea, is higher in 2020 than it was 2019. Meaning that 2020 is our best production year in terms of volume ever in our Farming operation.
Profitability is down. This is related to price achievement. Looking into the Wild Catch segment. It has been a demanding year. We have seen lower prices on the total portfolio of products, and those lower prices impact profitability. In sum, our operating profit for the year is down 29% from last year, driven basically by price effects. Again, we see that underlying activities is high given the relatively minor reduction in revenue. The earnings per share for the year is NOK 2.46, down 29% from last year. Looking into the balance sheet, our intangible assets are up. That's due to acquisitions of licenses in Norway from the Norwegian government. We have invested a lot in assets. Key assets include a new trawler in the Whitefish segment. It includes further build-out of smolt facilities both in Central Norway and Northern Norway.
Those are the key drivers for the increase in total non-current asset. Looking at biological asset here measured at cost, we see that figure is up. It's comforting to know that the amount of biomass has grown more. The cost per kilo going into 2021 of a live inventory is lower than it was going into 2020. Inventories, there are no larger changes on receivables. I would like to use this opportunity. It's been a fantastic job done in our credit department, and we've seen only very minor losses in that challenging year. In sum, we have a very strong balance sheet in our view. Net interest-bearing debt of NOK 3.5 billion. Looking on changes in net interest-bearing debt or cash flow, I will focus on what's happened on the year as a whole.
Our EBITDA or profitability has been less than last year and has been less than what we expected going into the year. Those changes in expectations are related to price achievement. We paid a little bit less tax, as our profitability in 2019 was lower than 2018, and we built a little bit of working capital due to building a higher biomass. We have invested and continue to invest heavily in our own value chain. Those investments are already covered. It's trawlers and smolt facilities. We pay the dividend of NOK 1.50. In sum, our net interest bearing debt is up by just below NOK 900 million. We believe we have a strong balance sheet and a good position going forward. Looking on return on capital employed. The long-term objective for that is reaching 18%, and that is a tough objective. We are not there in 2020.
Key drivers for the reduction from 2018 is lower prices. We do believe that the investments we are making both in assets and also in our organization gives us a good potential also going forward. Not saying that we will reach 18%, but we will do our best. In this period from 1993 up to and including 2020, Lerøy's average return on capital employed is just about at 18%. On dividend, the board has proposed to the general assembly a dividend of NOK 2 per share. That is higher than the normal stated dividend policy between 30% and 40%. It's also then a reflection of the dividend paid out last year, which was reduced from NOK 2.30 -NOK 1.50. We see that the trend of paying dividends and also stable increase in dividends is continuing, and dividend yield based on market cap and 2020 is around 3%.
Looking into the segment that's already been covered by Henning. We see the price effects in Farming and Wild Catch, and I get more into the following slides. Looking into operation in Northern Norway, Lerøy Aurora. We had a healthy, good performance Q3 and Q4, good development in costs. We are seeing some increased challenges on development of winter wounds also in 2021. That will impact price realization in the coming months. We do believe we are much better prepared to handle this situation now in 2021 than what we was in 2020. We continue to expect harvest volume this year of 47,000 tonnes. Also, the smolt facility in Laksefjord is now finalized and will be fully utilized in 2021. Central Norway. We've had a good production here, and production continue to be good.
Among choices we have to make is which fish to harvest, and we are harvesting fish that is not performing as good as we have expected. In this quarter, we've harvested smaller size fish at a lower average harvest weight, which is negatively impacting both price and cost. It's no change to the underlying development in Central Norway. Our expectation is, despite no growth in 2021 or basically no growth in 2021, we are in position to lower our cost slightly. For future growth potential, we are currently building a new smolt facility, which will be finalized late this year, early 2022, which will give growth potential for the years following. At our operation in Western Norway, this has been challenging for many years. We are very proud and very happy to present these numbers.
It's a lot of effort and a lot of investments, and it's very positive to see that that is bearing fruits. Among investments, our smolt facility in Kjærelva seems to be giving the impact we have been hoping for. We believe that the focus, the work in the organization is also developing this region. The numbers this quarter are strong compared to previous numbers, and it's comforting to see looking forward, that we expect this trend to continue. In 2021, we expect a higher harvest volume and a lower cost than what we saw in 2020. Still, our expectations are that costs in this region are higher than other two regions. There is still potential to be taken out. Looking into Wild Catch, Henning has already covered that the catches of haddock was a little bit below expectations in Q4.
Other than that, catch volumes were in line with last year. What we are seeing in profitability is an impact from lower price realization. Looking at the year as a whole, profitability for the year is down due to lower price realization. Looking into 2021, we know there will be a higher quota, which is positive for asset utilization. The big uncertainty is obviously price. Downstream, we are seeing improvements. We see that the focus on working through the value chain is working well. We have improvement projects in many of our factories, and those are working also well. We see that the focus on the very strong customer focus is also working well. Positive development increase in profitability from last year, and we do expect that there is a higher potential in this segment for the year to come.
To our associated company in the U.K., Norskott Havbruk, which is the owner of Scottish Sea Farms. This is a good quarter with cost reduction, expectations for further cost reductions. Also here has been done investments in improving the size and quality of smolts. Also here, those investments are working in terms of potential volume growth and potential cost reductions. A good quarter, and we continue to expect to harvest 36,000 tonnes in 2021. With that, I give the word back to you, Henning, to tell us more of where the seafood market is heading.
Thank you, Sjur. Okay. We will first of all have a look at the supply side. If we look at 2020, we see a global growth of 5.1%, and split it down on a growth of 1.6% in Europe and 11.4% in Americas. If you look at the estimates for this year, we see that we expect a growth of 8.4% in Norway and a negative growth of 7.3% in Americas. It's mainly Chile that is driving down that volumes. In Europe, of course, Norway is the largest one, increase of 7.1%. U.K. in percentage is up 12.3%, and Faroe Island up 21%, and Iceland further up 23%. We expect a good growth in Europe this year. At the same time, we are facing extremely low temperatures in Norway at the moment that might affect the total volume of the years.
It's probably too early to say what effect it will have. If we look at the prices, we see that the fourth quarter is the lowest quarter that we've had all the way back to second quarter. Third quarter 2015, we had NOK 41. The main reason for that is, of course, 2020 has been extremely challenging for everyone in the world, and also it has affected the Atlantic salmon. We also see that into 2021, we also see the low price level around NOK 45. We think that looking at February, the price is a little bit higher than that. We are facing extremely high volumes. This is not shown here because this is Kontali numbers from January 27th.
I think that the volumes in January is much higher than this, and also in February, we are seeing very high volumes on a weekly level. I think last week was up to export of 28%, 18,000 tonne compared to 22,000 tonne last year. Every week, the volume is much higher than what Kontali estimated. We are taking out more biomass than what we expected. That might change this picture, so it will be interesting to see next week when we get all the new updates from Kontali. We see we have stable volumes all the way until July. We will have a volume around 110,000 tonne.
We believe that all the channels, the HoReCa, and in all markets will step -by -step open up, and we believe that the demand will slowly come back, which might give us a positive price development going forward. We also believe that the volumes in the second quarter might be lower than what we expect because we take out more fish now, that we will see a high price level second quarter this year. When you come to second half of the year, we expect that then even more will have opened up, hopefully. The market will not be back to normal, but close to normal. Then we expect that the low prices for a long time in the retail now reach new consumers that also will stay there when the HoReCa is back, which will increase the demand for us.
We believe in a positive trend going forward, and we hope that we are at the bottom level at the moment. Yeah. Total Europe say the same picture. If we look at Americas, we saw that we will have a reduction of 7.1%, a lot of this reduction will come from May until end of the year. This fits good with the volume from Europe, and we see that we have a very stable supply situation for salmon through the year in total. That's good. That makes us in a better position to have stability volume into the market, and which is good for the growth of the demand. That's positive. If we look at the markets, fourth quarter, we see EU is up 15%. Other markets are up too. USA 5%, and Russia 13%, and Japan is growing fast now and is up 26%.
If we look at other markets, I will especially put my attention to China, which is down 50%. We see now going into the first quarter that the volumes in China is increasing step by step, so that's on the positive side for this year. If we look at the full year, we see that the EU is up 6%, others down 3%, U.S. up 6%. Russia stable and Japan up 20%. I think as we see, we have never consumed more salmon in Europe ever, 1.2 million tonnes. That's impressive. We still believe that the market for Europe can grow even further when the HoReCa is opening up again. If we look at the consumption in other markets full year, we see China is down 33%, Brazil stable.
There, we still have some heavy growth in a lot of these other markets, which is positive. The trout. Of course, the trout is very important for Lerøy, and especially for Lerøy Seafood. We are one of the largest producer of trout, and we have been affected heavily by volume growth last year and also the difficulties with the market access, especially to Russia. The four or five last year has been difficult and with a low price achievement for us and for other trout producers. Now, as I said, it looks more positive going into first quarter. Right now we're facing higher prices for the trout than the salmon, but at very low volumes. In total, Americas, we see down 11%, Chile is down 26%, Europe is down 8%, and Norway is down 15%. A global reduction of 9.5%.
We believe that we have grown a lot of markets because of a high supply the last year, up 12% 2019, up 4.5% 2020 globally, and up 20% in Norway last year. Now going down, we built up a lot of channels for the trout, and we believe that the price situation will be favorable for the trout in 2021 and going forward. Also, on a monthly level, we see we are at very low volumes in January, in February, in March, in April, May, and June. Step by step, it will come up, and this is normal for the season. It's at the same last six months, at the same level, maybe a little bit lower than last year. Also for the second half, we expect okay prices for trout.
For the outlook, we see a light in the tunnel regarding to open up the channel, especially for the HoReCa segment. We expect 205,000 tonnes-210,000 tonnes harvest, including 50% of Scottish Sea Farms. We expect a contract share of 20%-25%. We see a significant potential in the whitefish, and especially on the land side. We have been facing increasing prices every year after we came into the whitefish, and it's been challenging for the industry on land. Now we see that the quotas is up, the coastal fisheries are up a lot. We are right in the season right now, and we see that the prices is falling, which hopefully will affect the industry on the positive side. We have a new management group in Farming.
Stig Nilsen, which was the CEO for Farming, is now going into new position in the Group. Also Sven Amund Fjeldvær , which were the General Manager in Lerøy Midt, is also going into new position in Group as a Project Manager. This has been the plan for a long time. We built up a good organization with management to be ready to take over their positions. Bjarne Reinert, 38 years old, is the new CEO for Farming, starting from January 2021. He came from a position as a Fish Health Manager in Lerøy Seafood Group, has a master in fish health from Norwegian College of Fishery Science, and a master in strategy and management from Norwegian School of Economics, NHH. Nina Møgster has been General Manager in Lerøy Sjøtroll since 2018.
As you know, developed in a very positive way, taking Lerøy Sjøtroll into new good performance, she came from the position as CFO in Lerøy Sjøtroll. She has a master in fisheries and aquaculture science from Norwegian College of Fishery Science, MBA in seafood management from Norwegian School of Economics. Yeah, has been a fantastic manager for Lerøy Sjøtroll the last three years, will do a fantastic job going forward. Børge Soleng, now from February, new general manager in Lerøy Midt. He came from position as a production manager in Lerøy Midt Nordmøre. He has a master in biology in marine resources and aquaculture from NTNU, a bachelor in marine biology and economics from Ålesund University College. Kurt-Einar Karlsen's been in the company for many years also.
He was head of industry and R&D in Lerøy Aurora until 2016, and then he took over the general manager position from 2016. Also coming from fisheries and aquaculture science in Norwegian College of Fishery Science, and has a one-year studies in innovation management. A long experience both in industry and in farming and aquaculture, a very good background. We believe a lot in this team, and we really have a good feeling that they will take all the potential of the future growth in this segment. Good luck to this fantastic team. We have some new investments coming up. We are in the final negotiations to further our RAS capacity in West Norway. On the top picture there, we have [Kjærelva], which we built, and it's a full operation, and we are very happy with the development in this facility.
We see that we are taking a lot of improvements in our Farming activities having this facility in the first stage before we put the fish into the sea. Now we have decided to invest in Kjærelva 2, new facility, a RAS module that we have developed, each module of around 2,000 tonnes biomass. We are considering to build three such modules at Årskog in Fitjar, close to the other operation, but not next to it. Module 1 will have a 6 million smolt, going from 160 g up to 500 g, and Module 2 will go from 500 g up to 1,200 g. The third module can also be used for growing fish to full harvest if we feel that the timing is right for that. This is a strategic direction for us, is to learn more, build our organization to handle these kind of facilities.
We have done RAS investments in all regions, and we feel that we have a good know-how and a very good team organized to operate these facilities in a good way. The total CapEx for this investment will be close to NOK 1 billion, and will increase the production in Lerøy Seafood of 10,000 tonnes in total. The decision will be made shortly, and construction can be finalized in 2023. At the end, again, I take up our value chain. Like I said, we see improvements in all parts of the value chain, small improvements, and we believe that we can take out a lot of the potential that we see in this value chain. To work towards every part of the value chain and to educate our people, better understanding how to work and how to work together to take out the full potential.
Because we need to work together through the whole value chain in the best way, and everyone needs to understand that all we do in this value chain to create the most efficient and sustainable value chain is because we care about the customer, and to deliver our customer ability to have sustainable and cost efficient product, and to grow the category together with our key strategic customers all over the world. Thank you very much.