September 4, 2019 — Economists have been predicting the decline of China’s seafood processing sector for years, but that prediction may not be correct, Jesús Martínez, Asia managing director at Interatlantic, a Vigo, Spain-based seafood trading firm, told SeafoodSource recently. Founded in 1989, Interatlantic has an office in Dalian, China, and has increasingly turned to China and its booming seafood market for a bigger share of its revenue.
Statistics do show a decline in the Chinese processing sector – the number of Chinese aquatic product processing enterprises dropped from 9,674 in 2017 to 9,336 in 2018, according to the Chinese Agriculture Ministry, and the country’s processing capacity of aquatic products processing enterprises fell from 29,262,300 tons per year in 2017 to 28,920,600 tons per year in 2018. Additionally, actual processing volume of aquatic products in China decreased by 1.79 percent compared with 2017, to 21.56,850 tons. Freshwater processing products and seawater processing totaled 3.883 million tons and 17.75 million tons respectively.