Construction on a major aquaculture facility in southern China that is a joint venture involving the Louis Dreyfus Company, the Donlink Group, and the Guangdong Haid Group has been delayed.
Based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, Louis Dreyfus is one of the largest agricultural commodities trading firms in the world, posting USD 25.8 billion (EUR 23.8 billion) in revenue in 2023 – down from USD 30.3 billion (EUR 28 billion) in 2022.
In 2020, it announced the development of the Fuling Food Industrial Park, a RMB 7 billion (USD 1.1 billion, EUR 980 million) project in Nansha, Guangzhou, comprising a feed protein mill with a 1.8-million-ton (MT) annual soy-processing capacity, a vegetable oil refining mill with annual production capacity of 360,000 tons, and a high-end cooking oil production line with annual bottling capacity of 240,000 tons. The site also includes a packaged cooking oil warehouse, a lecithin production line, soybean oil tanks, and a soybean meal warehouse. In 2022, Louis Dreyfus said the 180,000-square-meter industrial park would also be the site of “high-tech ecological aquaculture.” Asked by SeafoodSource in 2022 what that signified, an LDC spokesperson said the firm wasn’t yet ready to elaborate.
Work commenced in April 2022, according to Dreyfus, which entered the Fuling Food Technology Co. joint venture as part of a strategy to grow its Chinese sales. In September 2023, LDC announced the joint venture had completed the first phase of work at the Fuling Food Industrial Park. However, that did not include any aquaculture facility, the spokesperson recently confirmed to SeafoodSource.
“Although it was not part of Fuling’s initial construction phase, a feasibility study is underway for the inclusion of an aquaculture facility, as part of the next phase, to meet consumption needs,” the spokesperson said. “We have no further comments at this stage.”
Several major Chinese aquafeed firms have recently announced the development of prestige aquaculture projects. Besides the Fuling Food project, Donlink Holding Group Co. – the company goes by Dongling in Mandarin – signed a deal with shrimp firm Guolian Aquatic in 2021 for a USD 2 billion (EUR 1.8 billion) development that included 2,000 offshore cages off the Guangdong coast. The company has not provided an update as to whether the project, which also included a 300,000-ton aquafeed plant, has been completed, though Guolian Aquatic announced its exit from the aquaculture business in May 2022.
Additionally, in February 2023, Tongwei pledged to make a CNY 1.2 billion (USD 164.2 million, EUR 155 million) investment into a recirculating aquaculture system (RAS) shrimp farm in Dongying in the Shandong province.
The same month, Guangdong Haid announced its involvement in its own CNY 8 billion (USD 1.1 billion, EUR 1 billion) land-based shrimp aquaculture project in Panyu, Guangdong province. The project aims to have an annual output of 200,000 metric tons of shrimp annually, Guangdong Haid Chairman and CEO Xue Hua told China Southern Daily. The first phase of the project has a cost of CNY 120 million (USD 16.7 million, EUR 15.4 million) and has the goal of harvesting 25,000 metric tons of shrimp per year.
