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MORPOL, the Polish owned seafood company, has swooped again in Britain.
This time it has acquired 100 per cent of Brookside Products Ltd a processor of smoked salmon based in Cumbria. The annual production capacity of Brookside is about 1.500 tonnes with an expected turnover this year of £12-million. Brookside is supplier to the Co-op and is licensed to produce smoked salmon under the well known John West brand.
The total transaction is settled by a combination of cash and an earn-out clause with a maximum transaction price of below £1-million.Brookside Products currently has an estimated market share of 10 per cent of the UK smoked salmon market. Morpol said it will use Brookside as a platform to further strengthen its position in this important market.
Jerzy Malek, CEO of Morpol said: "Through the combination of recent farming acquisitions in Scotland and this important step into smoked salmon processing within the UK, we now have an excellent base where we can further penetrate not only the UK market, but also other European markets."
Three weeks ago Morpol purchased Mainstream Scotland, a wholly owned subsidiary of Cermaq, which will make Morpol a unique vertically integrated player in the salmon farming and processing sector.
Then it announced its entry into an agreement to acquire the total assets of salmon company Rysa Salmon in Orkney for around 2.4 million euros..Rysa Salmon possesses two farming licenses and now produces organic salmon with a yearly harvest of around 450 tonnes in 2010. Morpol intends to enlarge the size of the salmon licenses to grow the annual harvest to approximately 750 tonnes annually.
Founded in Poland just 14 years ago, Morpol's growth is nothing short of impressive and the company now employs over 3,000 people in eight countries. Its customer base is in Europe, Japan and the United States.
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