Hello, good morning everyone. Welcome to Nordic Aqua's presentation of Q3. Today to present, we have with us Andreas Thorud from China and our CFO, Tom. If we go through the agenda for today, I will start with some highlights, and then Andreas will take us through market. I'll come back with operations and project. CFO Tom will take us through financials, and I will end with a summary and give some outlooks. If we start going to the highlights, we can say the highlight of the Q3 was that we announced a finance package for our company, so that was very positive to be able to come with this. Of course, also, as you can see the front page picture and also this picture, we can see that we took the first of four units in stage two also in use.
The finance package, which Tom will come back to, is one of the highlights. The harvest was of 630 tons of good quality fish, smaller than we normally have sold. It is mainly because we have taken out a number of fish needed for the growth going forward. Sales price also somewhat lower, mainly due to the small fish, but also we harvested most of our fish in the lowest paying month in August. Biomass production just under 1,000 tons, good biology otherwise. We aimed the year with 2,800 tons and the quarter. The CapEx was a positive story. We were able to take CapEx down for stage two from previously announced EUR 77 million down to EUR 65 million, a 16% reduce. We also had this successful transfer of fish into the first of four units in stage two. These were the highlights.
If we continue to market, our Managing Director in China will take us through. Please, Andreas.
Yeah, thank you for that, Ragnar. For the harvest and sales situation in Q3, we continue to develop the Chinese market with our Nordic Pure Atlantic, and we continue also to receive good feedback on all the fish we deliver. We had, as you also mentioned here in the beginning, 630 tons hog harvested with a superior share of 98%. In addition, the harvest weight of 3.1 kg, which was an equivalent of 3.8 kg live weight. As was mentioned, we were impacted now by having not the optimal growth earlier in the year in Q2. That meant that we had a lot of fish in our system, and we have to take that out to optimize the farming situation.
Then we have bigger sizes coming in the quarters to come and also towards our 7 kg strategy, 7 kg live weight production strategy that we've had. That will improve. In addition, the pricing we achieved was EUR 5.5 per kilo. That is also impacted by the smaller size that we quarter. In addition, most of our harvest was, or a great deal of it was in August when the prices were lower. We have seen obviously historical low prices in the market. However, this was still 9% above the spot price out of Norway. We look to also to work hard to do what we can to improve our price achievement further. I'm confident we have both the market and the team to make that happen.
Looking into what we did during the quarter, we had several activities we engaged in and also some other awards and achievements that were achieved. We had a very good exposure at the large trade show in China, the Shanghai fisheries trade show. We had a large booth. We had very good attention by potential customers and also existing customers. We received an award at China Salmon Industry Development Summit, which we had for our quality. It was a quality salmon producer award, which we were very proud to get by local peers. In addition, we had a very nice achievement of getting our launch of our raised without any antibiotics certificate certified to us by NSF. That is our first in China for Atlantic salmon.
That's also something that's highly valued by the local customers and market due to the high attention on food safety aspects. We also participated in two local events to promote our products to consumers. One here in our home region around Huzhou with regards to fishing festival. Also in Shanghai, we were part of a Norwegian market event there who was consumer facing with products related to Norway, which we also had our salmon on promotion and got a lot of good feedback from that. If you go to how we want to achieve further growth in this market and establish ourselves, we have our four pillars in the local value proposition, namely our unique freshness we can provide to the market compared to when Atlantic salmon fresh is imported. Also the food safety aspects we have with a very high superior rate of 98%.
We have a low mortality rate, so we know how to farm the fish, but also that we can certify certain aspects now, such as raised without antibiotics, the certification we got from NSF. Already some customers have used that in the market. That is a strong signal and it is also a strong testament we can send to the market that we take food safety very seriously and we have a high quality product. We also focus on sustainability. By being locally here, we can produce locally, we can ship it locally. We are in China for China. We think that is also good from a sustainability point of view, as well as the agility we have of connecting with customers. We are looking also to expand into more strategic partnerships down the value chain to promote our Nordic Pure Atlantic brand.
We will continue to develop both the food service sector with the larger sized fish and also continue more in the retail sector to gain further attention and also development towards customer in that segment. For those of you who do not know, we are situated in a very nice geographical position, 300 km south of Shanghai. We are serving what you call the Yangtze River Delta. We have 100 million consumers within a five hour reach. It is an affluent part of China with higher income areas. There is also a growing focus on health. We are also able now to get the product into distribution. In addition to that, we are also working on other areas of China where you have higher income areas, such as in the Beijing area and also south in Guangdong.
We have a full reach, should I say, to China to provide our products to where we think it will be meaningful for consumer to get it and also meaningful for us as a business case. Also, the Huzhou location is good for us with the water quality, also have access to energy stable prices and also the modern infrastructure that China can offer. The Chinese Atlantic salmon market has been a growth story now ever since basically the end of the lockdown three years ago in China. It's been a record quarter by quarter. We are doing here a rolling forecast quarterly, not forecast, rather the historical performance. We can see that until Q3 this year, it's just been going up and up. It's now on a run rate for over 170,000 tons. This year will be another record year.
There is close to a 50% increase in imports of whole fresh Atlantic salmon to China. The market is expected to double by 2030, reaching more than 200,000 tons. Maybe it will be before that, but China has been a fantastic growth story this year in terms of volume Atlantic salmon. We see that it is also going more into distribution, particularly into retail channels, which is very exciting. If we look at the makeup of the Chinese market in the next slide here, we will see that Norway is a dominant player. It has been a year where prices have been relatively low. Norway then becomes a very preferred origin in this market. They have taken a lot of market share, which has belonged to other players such as Chile, Australia, and so on.
This has really been a year with Norwegian salmon dominating the Chinese market. We think that this year will perhaps be a little bit of a special year in that regard. It will be interesting to see how things will be next year if there is a picture which we expect with higher prices. If you look at the overall situation when it comes to pricing in China, we can see now in August and September this year, this is how we calculate prices of the European origin, basically Norway, Faroe Islands, Scotland, compared to Chile and Australia, is that we need to go back to early 2021 to see the same landed prices in China. It has been historically very low prices that have come into China these recent months.
We also see that it was kind of inverted, the curve with, let's call it the European origin compared to the Chilean and Australian. We are now back to a premium gap opening towards the Chilean and Australian products. We look forward to monitoring this. We also look forward to see that we think that, along with the analysts and others, the pricing situation will improve in the coming period. That is at least our assumption we have. Thank you, Ragnar.
Thank you. Thank you, Andreas. Going further with the agenda, we go to operations. We have in stage one our 4,000 tons annual capacity that we have. If we can see on the left-hand side of the graph, the production is just under 1,000 tons this quarter. If we look at the feeding levels, they have been very stable throughout Q3 and also continue into Q4. The biomass buildup at the end of the quarter was just 2,800 tons. We have passed 3,000 tons now by this date. If we go to the project, as we have mentioned before, we started to take in use the first of the four units in stage two. That was in, we transferred a few fish on the 10th of October. If we look at the buildout of stage two, it has been quite successful.
We started to lay in eggs when the hatchery was finished. That was in Q3 last year. Construction has gone according to schedule. As I mentioned also to start with, we have a lower cost estimate now for the final buildout. We took it down from EUR 77 million down to EUR 65 million. I mean, the benefit was that we have had a very good relation with our suppliers, especially we can see an effect from the Aqua Group supply. We have standardized the units. All four units in stage two are identical compared with quite many different units when we built out stage one. Of course, also we are very pleased with our project manager who has very good control of the development and also the cost.
So far, we have spent EUR 40.1 million of the EUR 65 million by the end of the quarter. If you can see in the picture on the left-hand side in the bottom, on the right-hand side of the picture, you can see that there is a facility covered with solar panels. That is stage one. On the left-hand side, we can see stage two, not yet covered with solar panels, but they will come also there. If we just take a look at the buildout plan further, now we have completed for a while ago stage one. We are well on the way also to complete stage two. We will continue into stage three later. We have said earlier that we will announce the plans for this in the time to come.
We can say now that we are going to do some planning and specifications during 2026. Then when we can prove that stage one and two are operating as expected, we can take the final investment decision on stage three. If we look at the way that we have been building our facilities, we have been, as I mentioned, very pleased with the development. We have seen that the standardized modules that we are using now from Aqua Group have been easier to build, we can say. When we continue into stage three, it is just copying the same units. We expect to see the same effect on cost reductions as we have seen in the stage two buildout.
Of course, if we look at the project as a whole, that government is backing financially by building the infrastructure itself has also a great support for building capital efficient RAS facilities. Just having a look at the buildout, we can see that we will have the first harvest of what we could call stage three fish by Q3 next year. That is when we should expect the volumes to increase month by month. The detailed engineering for stage three is expected to be, or we will do that during next year. We expect to have a start of construction by the year end of 2026, beginning of 2027. We can have the first harvest approximately two years later than that. Our CFO, Tom, will take us through the financials.
Yes, thank you, Ragnar. As you can see on the table to the right, our revenue was close to EUR 3.5 million and operating EBIT -EUR 4.8 million and profit for the period after tax and financials - EUR 2.5 million. As has been commented both by Arno and Andreas, our revenues of EUR 3.5 million was negatively affected by having more than half of the harvest in August, which proved to be a weak month price-wise and also by the smaller size of the fish. The cost related to released volumes were high at EUR 9.45 per kilo due to slow growth earlier in the year. Our investments during the quarter was EUR 10.4 million, giving a negative cash flow of EUR 8.9 million all in all for the quarter. On the balance sheet, we just have it as a total of EUR 160 million or more.
The biomass comprised EUR 19 million, the cash EUR 4.7 million, and the equity EUR 67 million, close to 42%. As has been mentioned, towards the end of the quarter, we were entering a transformational capitalization and financing agreements in two parts. First, there was a long-term financing arrangement by a syndicate of banks led by Bank of China as an agent and lender. Secondly, a capital injection into the Chinese entity by two reputable state-owned entities. Together, this will accelerate our strategy execution for 20,000 tonnes and offer synergies as well as increasing our competence access and base. We will have refinanced all short-term and long-term debt and have a new financing base in local currency, I mean, and we will also consider IPOing the Chinese entity in the future.
Looking more closely at the debt part of this transaction, there will be one facility with a syndicate of Chinese banks for CNY 385 million for the long-term finance of our facility in Huzhou, asset facility, if you like. There will be a working capital facility of up to CNY 200 million for the scale-up of harvesting. There is also a preliminary agreement for stage three, which will be available subject to certain milestones, of course. We are now in the documentation phase for this transaction, and we expect to close in Q4. In the meantime, we have entered into a short-term bridge facility with Contrary for EUR 10 million. On the equity side, as mentioned, two new investors into the Chinese entity for taking a 20% stage for CNY 300 million, EUR 36 million.
We will get long-term local ownership, which will offer benefits for execution of the growth strategy to 20,000 tonnes and also operational and other synergies. It will broaden our future financing base and position the company for further expansion. As I mentioned already, the potential IPO in China. The governance structure will be according to national and international standards. We have called for an EGM at the end of November to formalize these investments and changes to the articles. In total, before I give the word back to Arno, these two transactions on the debt side and equity side together represent a strategic milestone for Nordic Aqua. It secures equity. It unlocks local debt financing with a broad lender base at attractive terms. It will enhance the company's ability to scale strategically, operationally, and commercially by supporting the expansion to 20,000 tonnes. Thank you.
Thank you, Tom. I will go to the summary and outlook now. We just mentioned also that you have the chance to go in and write some questions that we can answer once we are finished with the last slide. Please bear in mind also that there is a time lag. If you write them quite soon, then we will be able to answer them during the session. Going to the summary, we can see that like Tom ended, we have the financing package now in front of us so that it can enable us to continue to build a facility up to 20,000 tonnes. We have received very good feedback. It will be seen when we, especially probably when we enter into harvesting larger fish again during next year. The biology has been quite strong most of the time.
Q2 was maybe an exception, but other than that, it's been going very well with the production. The harvest was 630 tonnes during this quarter. If we look at stage two CapEx, very good development that we were able to reduce previously announced CapEx levels. If we look into next year now, or this year first, we have postponed some of the harvest. We have previously said 2,300 tonnes. Now we say that we will save some of the fish for early next year. It is 2,000 tonnes now. Next year, we expect there to be 5,000-6,000 tonnes harvest from the facility. Bear in mind that we will start harvesting from stage two from September and onwards. With this, I will conclude and just thank you all for attending. We can see that some questions have already been raised.
The first question is, if I read it up, can you comment on net biomass growth so far this quarter? That means in fourth quarter. Of course, now we have October has passed and also the first part of November. I can just say that the growth that we have seen has continued. We measure it on how much feed we deliver every day. If we are at or about 15 tonnes per day, that should be more than 4,000 tonnes per year in head and gutted. So far, we have been above 15 tonnes in feed deliveries per day this quarter. If this continues, it will be a very strong production quarter. There is a second question. This is on different issues.
The first part of the question is, should we still expect EUR 170 million in CapEx for stage three? That is the first question. I will just read them all up. The second is, how do you see price achievement in 2026? What do you expect of premium relative to Norwegian spot price? That was the second part of the question. The third one is, what do you expect of harvest rates in Q4 2025 and Q1 2026? I think I can answer some of the questions and Andreas can answer some of the questions also. The first part was, should we still expect EUR 170 million for CapEx for stage three? I can say that, as you also saw, maybe investigation, we will do detailed engineering during 2026. That is when we come up with a more secure price on stage three.
If we look at the savings that we have had in stage two, I can say also that it is expected to be lower than EUR 170 million. Whether it will be EUR 150 million or somewhat lower than that, then we will just come back to that one. I cannot say exactly at the moment what we expect the cost to be. Andreas, I think you are the best to answer the next question. How do you see price achievement in 2026? What do you expect of premium relative to Norwegian spot prices?
Yeah, I think we know the Chinese market is a market that values larger fish. We have said that we have a strategy now that we're working towards 7 kg live weight fish. Coming into 2026, we will provide larger fish to the market. Hence, we think our price achievement will be even better. For us, it's part of getting the right size that is mostly valued in the Chinese market. That is to get bigger size. We know the Chinese market has a preference for 6+ . When it comes to the premium, I think we had in quarter one this year, when we returned to the market, we had average hog sizes, if I'm not mistaken, of 5.6 kg, 5.7 kg in that quarter. It was kind of a half quarter for us in quarter one this year.
When we weighted our local selling price towards the weekly spot price out of Oslo towards that particular size segment, we were 20% above the spot price. That is just to give an indication. Our goal is to obviously get as best as possible. I think it's challenging to pinpoint an exact premium, but we see that it's very much tied to sizes. We're working hard to get the sizes up as well as establishing strong customer relationships and also promoting. I also mentioned we have now the raised without antibiotics and other compelling features of our product to the local market.
Thank you, Andreas. Then we can come back to the last part of this question. What do you expect of harvest weights in Q4 this year and Q1 next year? Of course, both Andreas and I could answer. I'll just start, Andreas. In this fourth quarter, we expect the weights to go somewhat up. We will go up towards 4 kg in head and gutted, so just somewhat under 5 kg in live weight. We continue to grow, increase the harvest weight into the next quarter in Q1. We expect to be maybe at 5.5 kg or so in live weight. Let's come back to that later, but it will be somewhat in that area. We have a final question, which I believe Tom, you will answer. It is what are the terms of the syndicate loan is the question.
Sorry, I had to unmute. We haven't disclosed the terms of the syndicate loan facilities. There are two: the project loan and the working capital loan. It's a long-term loan, 10 years. What you said is that the terms, both financial and non-financial terms, compare favorably to what is available in the European market. That is what we said so far. I think I'll stick to that for the moment.
Okay. Thank you very much, Tom. When we look at the list of questions, we can see we have completed the list now. Maybe we can just wait a little bit since there's a delay if anything else shows up. Yeah, we can just wait for a short while. Okay. It looks like no more questions. I'd just like to one more time, thank you all for attending. Thank you.