Kyokuyo, Japan's fourth-largest seafood company, has acquired Turkish seafood processor Kocaman Su Ürünleri İhracat ve İthalat Ticaret.
The acquisition was announced 29 January in a letter from the company’s board of directors, which confirmed Kocaman will become a holding of Kyokuyo Europe BV. Terms were not revealed, but the deal includes the transfer of 1.78 million shares of Kyokuyo stock to owners Osman Kocaman, Metin Yalçÿnkaya, and Ferhan Yalçÿnkaya. Kyokuyo said it expects the deal to close in late March 2024. Kyokuyo’s stock price closed on 31 January up nearly 1 percent to JPY 3,960 (USD 26.93, EUR 24.92), valuing the deal at around EUR 44.3 million (USD 47.9 million).
“We have decided to strengthen our food production and sales business for Europe by making this company, which exports frozen food products made from frozen foods to Europe, a subsidiary of ours,” the board wrote in its letter.
Bandÿrma, Balÿkesir, Turkey-based Kocaman is a specialist in frozen seafood sold mostly domestically, with EUR 13.9 million (USD 15 million) in sales in 2022, down from a high of EUR 17 million (USD 18.4 million) in 2020 and EUR 16.5 million (USD 17.8 million) in 2021. Its operating profit in 2022 was EUR 2.5 million (USD 2.7 million).
“In our medium-term management plan we have positioned ‘expansion of overseas business’ as an important strategy and are developing overseas bases with the basic policy of producing overseas and selling overseas,” Kyokuyo’s board said.
As part of its strategy, in 2022, Kyokuyo established Kyokuyo Vina Foods, a food production subsidiary in Vietnam and sales company for Southeast Asia in 2022, and in 2023, it established Ocean’s Kitchen Property Management in Kent, Washington, U.S.A. to manufacture and sell crab-flavored kamaboko, or cured surimi.
“[Kocaman has] been producing food for more than 40 years in Turkey, which is adjacent to Europe … producing seafood such as shrimp and salmon,” Kyokuyo said.
FY 2022 results, the Tokyo-based company reported net sales of approximately JPY 253.6 billion (USD 2 billion, EUR 1.9 billion), an increase of 1.8 percent over the previous fiscal year.
Kocaman Balikcilik is a third-generation family-owned company established in 1923, processing both local seafood caught in the Black Sea and Sea of Marmara, as well as imported seafood. Kocaman also supplies supermarket chains including Migros, Tesco, and Metro with marinated products, frozen shrimp, squid, and octopus, according to Eurofish.
Photo courtesy of Kocaman Balikcilik
