Hello. Welcome to Lerøy Seafood Group's third quarter presentation 2020. My name is Henning Beltestad, CEO of Lerøy Seafood Group, and with me today I have CFO, Sjur Malm. Lerøy Seafood Group is a fully integrated company of both red fish and White fish. You just saw our value chain for red fish. Our goal is to create the world's most efficient and sustainable value chain for seafood. The large extensive investments we have made over a long period of time are now starting to yield results. First of all, I will take you through the highlights in the quarter, then Sjur will take you through the key financial figures, and then I will come back and look at supply and demand, and also outlook for next year. Lerøy Seafood Group is reporting in three different segments: Farming, Wild Catch, VAP sales and distribution.
First of all, I will go through the overall highlights in the quarter. This is a fairly, relatively good quarter, with an EBIT of NOK 370 million. It's a little bit lower than what we had last year, where we had around NOK 500 million. The main reason for that is low earnings in the Whitefish, which has been a more difficult period the last two quarter because of COVID. A very tough situation for the Whitefish the last six months. Also for the salmon, but more for the Whitefish than for the salmon. If we look at the growth from post-smolt investments, we are on track and we expect significant growth going into 2021. For this year, we expect harvest, including associates, around 183,000 tons for 2020, and we expect a harvest of 205,000 tons-210,000 tons for 2021.
We have a further potential to grow beyond this. We expect, for this year, to have around 70,000 ton of Whitefish from Lerøy Havfisk. This quarter, we harvested about 44,000 ton compared to 46,000 ton last year. We had a capture volume of Whitefish of 11,000 ton compared to 13,000 ton last year. The EBIT for fair value adjustment of NOK 370 compared to NOK 500 same quarter last year. Farming highlights. First of all, if we look at the prices in the quarter, it's about the same as same quarter last year, a little bit up by NOK 1 . It's reduced a lot compared to second quarter, where we have seen prices which is NOK 10 lower. Of course, it's normal for the season, for this period, that we see lower prices compared to the first half.
High export volumes continuing to impact trout prices, we see improvements going into this quarter and also late Q3. The contract share is about 31%, the price realization for the contracts is higher than the spot prices in this quarter. We also mentioned with the last presentation that we expected significantly lower cost in Q3 compared to Q2, this has also happened. We have significantly reduced the cost in Q3 compared to Q2. The EBIT in Farming is NOK 7 compared to NOK 7.9 in 2019. If we look at the Farming volumes, the guiding for 2020 and also 2021. If we look at 2020 first, we are online with what we have estimated earlier. In Norway, a total of around 170,000 ton, 36,000 ton in north in Lerøy Aurora, 67,000 ton in Lerøy Midt, and 67,000 ton in Lerøy Sjøtroll.
It's good to see that we are improving and going from 158,000 to 170,000 ton. We have Norskott Havbruk where we have 50% ownership. Our share there is 13,000 tons, so a total of 183,000 ton. If we look into 2021, we expect 47,000 ton in Lerøy Aurora, so 11,000 ton increase, 17,000 ton in Lerøy Midt, and 75,000 ton in Lerøy Sjøtroll, so a total of 192,000 ton. Our part of Norskott Havbruk, 18,000 tons, so a total of 210,000 ton. An increase of 27,000 ton. Like I said, we have had a challenging quarter for Wild Catch. Significantly impacted by COVID-19 with lower prices and also low catch rates. Like I said, the catch volume is 11,000 ton, which is 16% down. A significant share of catch of cod in Q1 2020 and low catches in Q3. That's one of the main reasons.
Year-to-date EBIT is about NOK 250 compared to NOK 252 in 2019. We will see, and we expect improvements going into fourth quarter for the Whitefish catch and also the species that we're going to catch. This is showing our remaining quota for 2020. As you see, we have 7,100 tons of cod to catch. Compared to last year, it's about the same level. We have saithe 5,300 ton and haddock 8,400 ton. We expect to catch about 17,000 ton in total for this year. If we look at the VAP sales and distribution, it's been a very good quarter. It shows that our investments in the downstream activities all over Europe and in major markets is really showing improvements. We had an EBIT margin in this quarter of close to 3% compared to 2.3% in the same quarter last year.
An EBIT of NOK 131 million compared to NOK 109 million last year. I'm very happy to see the development in this segment. We still have a lot of potential improvements to do going forward and available capacities. That's good. Sjur will take you through the key financial figures.
Yes. Thank you, Henning. We've been through some quarters, both the second half in 2019 and start of 2020, where we have not performed according to our own expectations. We have seen challenges, particularly in our Farming operations. We are very glad to see that we are seeing significant improvements in production in sea and also significant improvements in profitability. Wild Catch is challenging with less demand from the COVID restrictions. Downstream, Henning touched, we have a good development. Looking at this quarter and the main drivers on the latter lines, you can see that our harvested volume is down 4%, basically in line with last year. We have a slightly lower profitability per kilo, which is driven by a lower price achievement. Our costs are also down, price achievement is more down.
Into Whitefish, it's difficult to view on one quarter alone, but there's no doubt that the profitability is very weak this quarter. In sum, this gives us an EBIT of NOK 370 million compared to NOK 501 million last year. We have a significant improvement in associated companies. Our operation in U.K. is a key driver. I will return to that. Net finance about the same level as last year, and earnings per share then down 11%. Looking at year-to-date numbers, our revenue is down, not so much. This is not due to activity, it's due to general price level. Our depreciation and amortization is far up. We made significant investment recent years in all parts of the value chain, including trawlers, including smolts, including industrial facilities. We have not fully utilized these as of today, but we will utilize them even more into 2021 as our guiding indicates.
That gives us EBIT of NOK 508 million, which is down 23% from last year. Again, looking at key drivers, we have harvested more fish. We also have a higher biomass in sea. In sum, we have better production this year than last year. Our profitability per kilo is down. That is due to the fact that we have higher costs year to date, and we have also a lower price realization. On Whitefish, the picture is different looking year to date compared to the quarter alone. That is due to a very good first quarter, and we were lucky in timing of our catches. Year to date, there's not that big fall in profitability. In sum, our EPS is down 27%. Return on capital employed is around 11%, which is below our target.
We do expect that the investment recent years should give a basis, obviously dependent on how prices develop, to see increase in profitability in coming years. Looking at the balance sheet, non-current asset is up. We've invested in licenses buying from Norwegian state. That's the increase in intangibles. We have received a new trawler in our Wild Catch segment. We are currently building smolt facilities in Northern Norway, Laksefjord, and Central Norway at Belsvik, which are key drivers for the increase in intangible fixed asset. Biological assets are up. We built quite a lot of biomass this quarter. This number is up 7%, so value of the biomass is up 7%, and the biomass itself is up 2%. The value per kilo is higher, which does not correspond typically with the falling cost.
What's important to know is that we have a lower average size of the fish in sea, so we have more fishes. Effect following the investment in larger smolt is that each smolt is more expensive. Our ability to utilize that size through growing the fish larger, but also our ability to scale our cost base, meaning that it will give us higher production, makes us expect that we will see a continued decline in cost into next year. Other working capital items. We have slightly higher Whitefish inventories. We have slightly higher red fish than finished goods inventories. We have lower receivables, but nothing dramatic. Net interest-bearing debt is around NOK 3.5 billion. We believe we have a strong balance sheet. Looking at changes in net interest-bearing debt. It is our soon return to developments yet to date.
Just looking at this quarter, due to changes in payment schedules, paid taxes later this year than last year. We have invested a lot, including NOK 80 million in licenses from Norwegian government. Looking more on year-to-date figures. We know that our profitability is down from factors already covered. We are paying slightly less tax. With the significant buildup of biomass, we have built also working capital, so cash from operation is NOK 1.8 billion compared to NOK 2.2 billion last year. We are investing heavily in facilities already mentioned, also buying licenses, which is the reason for the increase in investments, and we paid slightly less dividend. I think in some cash development this year has been, despite the challenging marketing situation, satisfactory. We have kept our focus on long-term investments and building biomass, which we expect will give us growth into 2021.
This slide is just to show you what are the changes from last year. As already commented, the big change you can see is the Whitefish segment, which is down NOK 90 million compared to the same period last year. Looking into Farming. Lerøy has seen some challenges. We had a fire at the smolt facility early 2019. We had algae in 2019. We had challenges with winter wounds first half of this year. It's been a challenging period of time. What we said at the second quarter presentation was that we are seeing vast improvements and Lerøy has historically delivered very strong performances. It's very comforting to see that we are on the recovery back to that. There's a significant cost cut compared to previous quarter, significant improvement in quality, and on spot prices down NOK 10 per kilo.
You can see our profitability is doubled. We've chosen to call that a recovery. We expect lower cost in Q4, and we expect a significant growth in harvest volume into 2021. Looking at the Lerøy Midt. Last year, second half, we saw challenges with our growth, basically, in the farming operation, and we lost growth, a significant number of 1,000 tons lost last second half. We saw some challenges also in September of this year. Luckily, with focus, good operations, we relatively quickly returned to normal and back to our expectations. We are seeing a reduction in cost this quarter. We expect cost the same level in Q4, and we expect to see improvements, a little bit more production next year.
The new smolt facility, which is currently being built, which will be finalized during 2021, close to 2022, should give a potential for significant growth going forward. Lerøy Sjøtroll. We are losing money, which is no good and is not satisfactory. We are this quarter also harvesting the high-cost spring 2019 generation, which has had a high-cost point and which we've been harvesting recent quarters. On trout, we are seeing much better production cost, but we still are hampered by a quite massive volume growth in the market, 25% up yet to date. When you are losing money, there is no alternative to getting better. It is very positive to see that recent years' efforts are starting to work. We are now seeing the best production these days that we have seen in this region. We feel we are on path to an improvement.
It's not going to be 100% where we would like it to be next year. Important thing is that we believe we are moving in the right direction following investment in smolt, better quality smolt, larger smolts, following investment in wellboat, gutting boat facilities, following investments in people and focus, following investment in genetics. We believe we are moving in the right direction, and that we should see better numbers from the other Sjøtroll going forward. Wild Catch is already well covered. It's been a very challenging quarter, both on trawling side and on the land-based industry, due to demand not where we expected it to be going into the year. We've catched a low volume. We are seeing lower prices. As highlighted, and year to date figures are much better.
For the land industry, there are some underlying improvements which are all very positive. Unfortunately, those are not visible in the financial numbers due to the fact that the conventional loin market is not performing as well as during the COVID-19 restrictions. This VAP, Sales and Distribution is already covered by Henning. We think it's very positive that we see in some of our downstreams factories significant underlying improvements, which makes us positive on a potentially into 2021. Norskott Havbruk are joint operations in associated company in the U.K. Also here we saw a challenging second half of 2019, which has impacted us, also in North Scotland. New smolt facility is in place. It's positive to see that releases from this facility is going according to plan, and we expect to see significant growth into 2021.
It is positive also obviously that the financial performance is much better than what it was one year ago. With that, I give the word back to you, Henning.
Thank you very much, Sjur. I will look into the supply and demand side. I start with this slide. A lot of numbers, but it's a lot of information in it. First of all, if we look at 2021, we see that in Europe, there is about zero growth in Europe this year. In Americas, it's about 10.4% increase, a global growth of 4.2%. I think this is the highest global volume of Atlantic salmon ever. If we look into to 2021, the global volume is flat, it's about the same level. Europe is up 4.6%. Americas down 7%. It's mainly Chile which is reducing their volume in 2021 because of biological challenges. If we look at the spot prices, it's fluctuating normally the prices, as I mentioned, is going a little bit down second half compared to first half of the year.
We see 2020, we had NOK 68 in first quarter, NOK 58 in second quarter, and NOK 47 in third quarter. So far in the fourth quarter, it's about NOK 44. Normally, end of this quarter, the price is starting to hike up. We will see what's happening this year. Of course, we are in the middle of a very special situation with the COVID-19, but we hopefully will see a trend going up towards Christmas. One reason for that is that we see that the volume in October, we had the highest volume ever in Norway, so 140,000 tons. About 130,000 tons in November. We will go about 125,000 tons in December, which is the highest demand month for Atlantic salmon. Hopefully we will see a trend going upward for the prices.
If we look at Europe, it's the same picture with a little bit higher volume in U.K. in December. If we look at Americas, we have seen months with a very high increase growth. We see at the end of the year and going into December, the growth is not there anymore. We see also for the worldwide, we see that we have had a growth up to 10% in the top months. If we look at the consumption, we see a growth of 4% in third quarter. We see a 7% increase in EU. EU has been very strong and it's basically the retail segment that is pulling the market up. A lot of the sales of Atlantic salmon is in the retail at the moment.
In the U.S.A., probably the same, up 9%, there you probably will see a lower value than what we had in the E.U. We see a 8% decrease in other markets. The main reason for the decrease in other markets is China in this quarter, we see that China is down by 52%. If you look at year to date, September, we have a growth of 1% globally for Atlantic salmon, 3% up in the E.U., 6% up in the U.S., 4% down in other markets. You also see here that it is China that is the most challenging market within this other market segment. We hope to see a more stable development again in China going forward.
If you look at the trout, Lerøy is one of the largest producer of trout in the world and definitely the largest producer of trout in Norway. As we've said earlier, it's been difficult for the trout also in third quarter. We have had a challenging situation with the prices, with much lower prices compared to the salmon. We also mentioned that we expect to see that the trout will be closer to the salmon price level going forward. We've seen end of the third quarter and into fourth quarter that the prices of trout has been increasing while the prices of salmon has been decreasing. It's more on a stable level, relatively. We also expect lower volumes going forward into 2021.
The main reason for the low prices in Europe this year is that we've had a 10% increase in Europe and a 17% increase in Norway, which has affected the price level of trout dramatically. We are positive with the global reduction of 2% and a reduction in Europe of 6%, and a reduction in Norway of 12% in the supply of trout. This slide is showing the monthly growth for trout. We see so far for this year, it's been a growth of 24%, and you see that in some months it's been up to 50% and 60% growth. Then it's hard to go in and out and to develop new markets. A more stable production would be better. If we look into next year, we see a higher stability.
We see that until October we will have a huge reduction in the supply. We expect that the market, the supply and the demand will be more in balance for next year compared to what we have seen the last couple of years. We have a very positive view on trout going forward. Outlook for Lerøy fourth quarter. Like we have said, the COVID-19 is unpredictable. We have seen large improvements during Q3 and also expect that these improvements will go into fourth quarter. We expect a contract share for salmon of 30%-35%, and we expect a decrease of cost in Farming. We have a total harvest volume of 183,000 tons for this year. If we look into next year, 2021, we expect a significant growth in Lerøy.
In Norway, we will harvest about 192,000 tons and including associates like Norskott Havbruk in Scotland and our share, we expect a total of 205,000 tons-210,000 tons. We still see a significant potential in the Whitefish even though we've had some challenging quarters. Of course, first quarter was fantastic, the best quarter ever for the Whitefish, and the second quarter and third quarter has been difficult. It will be some improvements going into fourth quarter, and we expect that 2021 we will do the improvements on the industry side on land and also expect that we will have a good fishery and increased quotas for the Whitefish. To summarize, we feel that we have a good operation at the moment. We are taking out the improvements through the whole value chain, and we believe that we will continuously make improvements going forward and into 2021 and 2022.
Thank you very much.