SALMON firm Marine Harvest, which employs more than 400 people in Scotland, is paying $166 mil-lion (£100m) to buy a stake in industry rival Morpol.
Morpol, founded in 1996 in Poland, is a major supplier of smoked salmon to Germany. It employs more than 3000 people across eight countries including Scotland. Its subsidiary Meridian Salmon Group has its headquarters in Rosyth, Fife.
Morpol also has further sites on Shetland and Orkney, with the overall group planning to harvest about 30,000 tonnes of salmon in 2013.
Oslo-listed Marine Harvest is buying an initial 48.5% stake but plans to bid for the remainder in the coming weeks.
The shares sold yesterday were owned by companies controlled by Morpol founder and chief executive Jerzy Malek.
More than 40% of the settlement will be paid in Marine Harvest shares.
Mr Malek has informed the Morpol board he intends to stand down from his executive role in the first quarter of next year.
Alf-Helge Aarskog, chief executive of Marine Harvest, said: "Morpol's activities and large range of high quality products fit very well with Marine Harvest's current processing business, as well as our downstream strategy.
"Morpol has its main market in Germany, but sells into 39 countries. Marine Harvest has very limited sales of smoked products in the German market. A future integration with Morpol will hence offer complementary benefits to Marine Harvest."
Morpol had revenue of more than €495m (£373m) in 2011.
Marine Harvest is financing the deal by issuing shares to a firm controlled by its largest shareholder, shipping tycoon John Fredriksen.
Marine Harvest chairman Ole-Eirik Lerøy added: "The purchase of the Morpol stake is in line with Marine Harvest's strategy of forming a world-leading integrated protein group."
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article