Welcome to Nordic Aqua's presentation of Q3. Presenting today will be myself, Ragnar, CEO, and our CFO, Hjalti. So we will just continue, go through the agenda. So today we'll go through some highlights. And then we would like to present to you some new recruitments that we have had lately. We will go through biology, project, market, then our CFO will come in and present the financials, and we will end with the outlook and summary. So first for the highlights. Biology is good. It's been good performance in all batches. And if we go to fish health and welfare, also looks very good. And there has been left less than 1% mortality in all batches accumulated from 150 grams.
We will come back to this. I can just mention that in batch one, the mortality is 0.9%, in two, 0.7%, and in batch three, there's 0.4%. And there are no signs of maturation in the fish. If we go through the biomass production in Q3, it's just under 400 tons. So the total biomass by end of Q3 is 610 tons. If we take from end of quarter until now, we can say that the biomass is currently at around 1,000 tons. Batch one has, by mid-November, reached an average weight of 2.1 kilo. And we expect the first harvest of this batch in March next year. And then there will come full capacity of harvesting from May.
When we look at the fish farming equipment that we have built for Stage 1, we are nearly finished, and the total CapEx is at EUR 53 million. I will present that we have strengthened both operational and the commercial team through new hirings. We have also strengthened the financial capacity and flexibility by having a capital increase of NOK 100 million. Our CFO will come back to this also. And if we look at the available liquidity by the end of the quarter, it was EUR 36.5 million. So for the new hirings, we have recruited Andreas Thorud as Managing Director in China division. And Andreas will start some months into next year. Very happy to have him on board.
Very experienced from the Chinese market side, especially. We have hired Tan Yong, who has been with us for some years now, as project manager. He's been working in the project team before. Jóg van Zachariasen as group accounting manager, and Denise Qiu, she's our financial manager in China. And then we have one more farming expert, Orfa Cabrera. She came in in August, and Dan Tan, sales manager, he also came in in end of July, August. So if we go through the biology first, we can say that we have now seven batches on site. So each batch is around 300,000 fish, so it's close to 2,000,000 fish on site.
We have moved the fish through the departments, so they start in the hatchery, then they go to RAS one and two and three, and then they are smolts, and then we put them into the big building, where they go from four, five, six, and now just started to move fish in seven these days, as we are speaking. If we go and have a look at how the growth has been, we can see on the left side, batch one. The blue line is actual, and the gray line is the budget, and we are currently one week behind. If you have been following us before, you have seen that we have been a little bit more behind before. We have caught up a little bit on the growth.
So it's the fish has been growing well. Those who have followed us for a while can also maybe remember that early this year, we needed to cool down the fish because they were growing too fast. That's why we can see a little break on the growth curve. If we go to batch two, growth is ahead of schedule with about three weeks. The mortality has been low, as I mentioned, 0.9% in batch one from 150 grams, so like from smolt. And in batch two, it's 0.7%. There are no sign of maturations. And if we take the biggest tank in batch one now, the average weight is 2.8 kilo.
And if we take the growth that the fish has shown now lately and just forward this growth, then we can see that early March, the fish should be the targeted size of 5.3 kilo live weight. So then we will be ready for the first harvest. If we go to the next batches, three, four, five ... It's very good growth compared to budget. Seven, eight weeks ahead of budget, and also low mortality. So all in all, the biology things are developing very well. Just go and say a few words about the project. Here you can see a picture of how the site looked three weeks ago, two, three weeks ago. So we have nearly finished what we call Stage 1 of the project now.
In August, we moved fish from RAS 6 to RAS 7. I'll come back with a picture to show you where this is. And then we are currently moving fish from RAS 6 to 7, and 6 to 7, that is the final stage. So fish will be produced up to full harvest size in RAS 7, and then they will be transferred into our processing plants from RAS 7, via the purging facility. And the purging will be finished by early or late December, early in January. And the final stage, our final production for the next batch, that is what we call RAS 8, that will be finalized in February. And that is the end of all the construction in RAS 1. The processing plant will be ready by February.
And, we have changed a little bit the plans as we have communicated before. So we decided not only to build now, a processing plant for the first, two stages, but also for Stage 3. So we have expanded on, on the processing plant. With little, small, more, additions, we can have the, the processing plant to harvest 20,000 tons. So, here you can see a picture of, the plan of the project, how it should look when we go all the way up to 20,000. So the blue, that is what is finished now. With sharp eyes, you might be able to see that, the smallest units are called RAS 1, 2, and 3, and then we go over to the big building, where we have RAS 4, 5, 6.
That is where we had the biggest batch, but it's going to be moved now into RAS 7, and RAS 8 is nearly finished. And then just above, also blue, is RAS 9, that's the purging. The dark gray, that is what we have initiated now, and that's where we are, we are going to start to build this as we speak. And then the light gray. The light gray part is the 20,000 tons facility, and that is still under planning. It has been designed, so we are preparing everything now that we are constructing Stage 2, so that is easy and ready to go back and continue into Stage 3.
If we go and have a look at the timeline, we put the first fish in RAS in Stage 1, in Q1 in 2022, and then we will harvest the first fish in Q1 2024, so two years. That is what we have communicated all the time. For Stage 2, we have started on constructing some of the small units, but we expect now to put the first fish in Stage 2 in Q3 or July next year. So that is a few months delayed compared to what we have said earlier, as we have spent more time on design, so that we have designed very, very accurate everything this time before we start. So it's easier to follow the production once we put the fish in.
If we look at Stage 3, we have said that we can start that in Q2 2025, at the soonest now. So we will come back to exactly when the start-up will be on this one. Saying a few words also about the market. We can see now some columns with different colors, and the colors refer to origin, and the height of the column is the import volume to China from different countries. So we can see that in 2018 and 2019, it was growing. It was good, getting close to 100,000 tons, but then COVID-19 came, and then the volume into China decreased significantly.
The expectations now for 2023 is to reach the highest level ever, so there's been a good growth in the market. Norway is the largest exporter to China, and Chile is number two. Of course, now there will be some production also inside of the country when we are entering. If we look at the market, we are preparing ourselves very much now. You can see on the picture here, our team that was up in Qingdao, the trade show, in China, and we brought a live fish with us, a big live fish with us, which created some attention. If we look at where we are located, we are located in the greater Shanghai area.
We have 100 million consumers within reach or very short driving distance, and what we can see also is that China is mainly a HORECA market, so hotels, restaurants, and catering is the main market. But as other markets, we expect also that China will develop more into retail, and we find our products very suitable to go into the regrowing retail market as we grow. As I mentioned, we have planned now our first harvest in March next year, and once we start, we will start a little bit slowly, and then we'll gradually increase the harvest, so that it will stabilize at 330 tons per month from May.
Once we're up and running there, it will be on an annual basis, 4,000 tons harvest from this first facility, or first phase that we have built. Now we'll come into the financials, and our CFO will present this.
Thank you, Ragnar. The main points from the financials is that it's in line with our plans and budget. The end of third quarter, the biomass reached just about 600 tons, and this is the third quarter where we have value adjustments in the biomass, with a total value of EUR 5 million, including the fair value adjustment. Total CapEx going forward, Ragnar mentioned that Stage 1 will reach EUR 53 million when finished. We have leasehold improvements EUR 3.5 million. These expenses will occur in fourth quarter and into first quarter next year. And also, as he mentioned, the processing plant has been designed to produce or to process 8,000 tons, and with some minor adjustment, it can take us up to 20,000-ton production.
Plan now is to use EUR 4.5 million, and then we should add EUR 1.5 million when we are going to produce 20,000 tons in on a later stage. As announced yesterday, the board decided to increase the liquidity with NOK 100 million. This adds for buffer and flexibility to the company. We are next year, early next year, entering into the global salmon market, where we see prices are fluctuating, and it's important for us to have sufficient buffers. But also this adds flexibility and buffers for the timing of building of biomass and the timing of CapEx expenditures. Profit and loss in line with the expectation.
When you look at external expenses and staff costs, they are higher as we are increasing production and also as we are preparing for processing and sales and the administration is growing. We have a financial income that comes from the exchange deviation between renminbi and euros. We have a intercompany loan between the mother company, Nordicus Partners in Norway and the Chinese entity, and that adds EUR 500,000 in exchange deviation in third quarter. And then we have the fair value adjustment also just above EUR 1 million, totaling a profit on EUR 400,000 in third quarter. Financial position. Total assets have now reached EUR 91 million.
Of course, we can see a big increase in non-current assets, building and constructing phase I and also a part of phase II. And the biomass, just below 5 million. And we have also started now to recognize the leased assets as the small building has been handed over. We will continue to increase this number as we are taking over the big building also, the leased big building. Cash flow is also in line with our plans and budgets. We have a net cash flow in third quarter of -EUR 13 million, and the cash end of the quarter, EUR 22 million, but available liquidity was EUR 37 million. And then we have strengthened the liquidity through this EUR 100 million capital increase that we have yesterday. Thank you, and now back to you, Ragnar.
Yeah, thank you, Hjalti. Before we go to the last slide, I think we just mentioned also that, on the login that you have had, it is possible to write questions down, and then we can answer these questions, toward the end of the session. But I will just come and sum up. So, when we look at Stage 1, it is nearly completed now. There is still a little bit of installation and then commissioning left in the two large units. And the CapEx has been in line with budget and according to time. Biology, very good, excellent fish health. First harvest, March, we have mentioned that a couple of times now.
We have strengthened the organization, looking very much forward to having Andreas to start and all the others, they have already started, so they have been a very good addition to the team. We have had the capital increase with NOK 100 million, as we have presented. Stage 2, we have initiated, and Stage 3 is still under planning. So by that, we say thank you, and then we can go and have a look if there are questions from the audience. I can see that there is one question. I can just read out the question.
How do you think the chances are that you will be able to finance Stage 3 by debt bank loans instead of equity?" And the answer to that is that it is too soon to say. There are two factors that we need to get in place before we can answer the question. One of them is that we need to come up into selling of fish and see the prices and see the cash flow that it brings. So that is one of the factors, and the other one is that we are in discussions. We have started discussions with banks on the financing Stage 3, and we are not at a level yet that we can say what the gearing ratio can be on this one.
So the answer, the short answer to that is it's too, too soon to say. That is the only question I can see. We can wait half a minute and see if any other questions should arise. Anyways, if anyone should have any questions to us, you can just look up the contacts. Either send an email to Hjalti or I, then we can answer your questions also. So by that, I think we just conclude the presentation, and thank you for listening.
Thank you.