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Nov 29, 2023 (newstodate): Cape Fish, Norway's largest exporter of live and frozen crabs, is looking into bleak prospects for 2024 and beyond.
   -This year has posed enormous challenges for us and other companies in this industry, says Bjorn Ronald Olsen, Cape Fish CEO.
   -In the cause of the ongoing war over Ukraine, we are facing huge competition from Russia sending tank ships carrying 2-300,000 tonnes of crabs via the Northeast passage to China, overflowing the market with cut-price products.
   -At the same time, the crab export logistics is hampered by the closure of the Russian airspace to airlines including Finnair that was our preferred partner out of Helsinki, so today commodity prices are spiraling downward while transportations and other related costs are rising to the sky.
   -Add to this that Norway is decreasing the quota in 2024 for king crabs to 1,200 tonnes, down from this year's 2,200 tonnes.
   -All in all, we do not see any signs of recovery in the year, or years, to come, and no other markets including North America are opening to balance the drastic decline on our Asian markets including China, says Mr Olsen.
   As earlier reported by newstodate, Russia exported 13,149 tonnes of live king crabs to China in this year's H1 alone - an increase by 64 percent, y-o-y.