New Zealand King Salmon Investments Limited (NZK) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the New Zealand King Salmon Investments Limited Full Year Results Announcement. [Operator Instructions] I'd now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Carl Carrington, Chief Executive Officer. Please go ahead.

[Foreign Language] Good morning to everyone. Welcome to this webcast for New Zealand King Salmon. We'll kick off now. So just to start with our standard disclaimer. Please make sure you've read that, you consent with that and understand the disclaimer there. And the presenters for today will be myself, Ben Rodgers, our CFO; and Grant Lovell, our GM of Aquaculture. So just starting off with a summary of what we'll cover today, FY '25 performance. The net profit after tax is $13.4 million compares to last year at $28.5 million. So compared to the prior period, the GAAP results were impacted again by noncash adjustments relating to the fair value loss on biological assets of $7.7 million and a smaller contribution from the continued unwind of the ForEx contracts that were executed in FY '22 of $4.3 million. The FY '25 pro forma EBITDA, which is both our preferred performance measure and the profit measure King Salmon guides to was a profit of $29.7 million, which compared to last year of $24.5 million. Entering into the third summer through the adapted farming strategy, unfortunately, higher-than-expected seafarm mortality has occurred in the month of March, coupled with lower-than-anticipated growth rates over the most recent summer will result in a reduced harvest for this coming year. Although mortality is well below the FY '21-'22 summer, it highlights that we do still have much more work to do to improve fish health outcomes. I also highlight that the adaptive farming strategy has delivered baseline resilience. As Grant will talk to later on, the conditions we've experienced this summer are very similar to '21-'22, and yet we have delivered much better fish performance outcomes. Focus continues to be on optimizing core earnings to increase the self-funding component of the Blue Endeavour project. Now turning to Blue Endeavour itself. We have recently announced the significant funding partnership of up to $11.7 million signed with the New Zealand government under the Sustainable Food and Fiber Futures fund. A baseline monitoring of the site is continuing through to May of this year. And open ocean infrastructure, the pens are now under construction in Picton. Mooring grid components are in transit to New Zealand and the pilot service vessel is under construction with expected delivery in October '25. The pilot RAS is under detailed design, and we expect that to commence construction in Tentburn later this year. And pilot farm fish are currently being grown out in Tentburn, ready for transfer to the nursery farm at Waihinau in April '25 and will then transfer to the Blue Endeavour site in October of '25. Talking about the balance sheet, it remains strong with net cash on hand at approximately $50 million, just over. FY '26 CapEx is forecast to be around $21 million. CapEx, excluding the BE pilot forecast at $9 million. Projects are focused on stay-in-business CapEx, including replacement nets, moorings, machinery and site works. FY '26 BE pilot CapEx estimated at $12 million, and that's for the pens, moorings, service vessel and commencement of work on the RAS pilot. Guidance for next year. Pro forma EBITDA guidance in the range of $15 million to $24 million. We appreciate that's a wide range, which we will look to narrow through the year as we build more confidence around the expected harvest outlook, which we, at this point in time, forecast in the range of 5,900 to 6,300 tonnes. Just turning to some operational highlights. Harvest for the year, just under 6,800 tonnes for FY '25 and record revenue of $211 million. Fantastic growth there. New Zealand market remains a very solid base for us, 32% of our earnings. North America is rock solid, 44% and Australia at 11%. China, 2%, still very small part of our business, but very important for our future growth. Those 4 markets I've just mentioned are really strategic growth markets for the future, although I do acknowledge Japan at 3%, very important market for us to keep that open. GAAP result for the year, you can see the 13.4%, how that compares historically and the pro forma EBITDA, $29.7 million, nice trend line there in the -- in operating EBITDA. Our focus for the coming year is really around 2 themes: solidifying our core and executing the growth. We've put a lot of time into making sure we've got a very solid, clear strategy and action plans to back it and the organizational capability to implement our growth strategy. A lot of work going on our investment program now sequencing for growth, just making sure we've got the right [Audio Gap] the rights technologies [Audio Gap]. Obviously, a complex project to be executing and a lot of pieces in the puzzle to get them built in the right sequence, so they're available as and when required. The first 2 components being the Blue Endeavour pilot farm and the pilot RAS, they are underway now. We continue to work on our greenfield processing options. We have a bit of time before we need to make any commitments around that. So continuing to run to ground the best configuration there. And market development, we have already started some of the market development, particularly with China. Again, it's a little bit of sequencing to be done there, a bit difficult to commence too far on market development without having the volumes to support it. Managing risk and trying to reduce opportunity for volatility. We have ensured that we have suitable risk mitigation in place to support our growth, strengthening our risk management culture and capability. And a lot of it will mean we are making investments that you won't see, which is actually a good thing, things like our flood protection, critical plant resilience investments as well. Piloting the new technologies is just taking a cautious approach, make sure we prove up the technology, make sure we're competent, capable at running those new technologies before we start scaling up. We have undertaken some very detailed hydrology assessments at our freshwater sites in Takaka and Tentburn, wonderful insights from that work, which will help inform our future investment strategies for both those sites. And we continue to invest in our breeding research, big focus on thermal tolerance and survivability, vaccine development and diet trials, fantastic to have the experimental pens, trial pens now built at Ruakaka, and they are working very hard for us right now. So we're continuing to work on improving salmon resilience in the warmer waters. Obviously, the farming strategy has proven its worth over the last summer, but these other initiatives will now take us to the next level of resilience over time. Very appreciative to have a very supportive government policy now. The Resource Management Amendment Bill passed this year saw the extension of our farming licenses by 20 years out to 2050 as a maximum. That gives us the certainty to underpin our ability to invest. So very appreciative to this government for that action. And future farming, the name of our partnership with New Zealand government, a blueprint to accelerate salmon farming in Aotearoa, just signals the commitment this government has to supporting aquaculture and our role in helping to double New Zealand exports over the coming decade. So again, great news to have that government support to help derisk our pilot programs. Just turning to the brands, continuing to strengthen our 3 core consumer brands, Ora King, Regal and Omega Plus through some great innovation, undertaking some market expansion and a very meaningful partnerships in market that are engaging both consumers and key industry players. We continue to leverage the Ora King ambassador chef program. I was recently in the States and saw some fantastic chef collaborations between very well-known U.S. chefs and the credibility that gives to our Ora brand is just phenomenal. I can't speak highly enough of that program. And our Regal ambassador, Al Brown, is doing [Audio Gap] absolutely fantastic job for us [Audio Gap] giving us lots of organic [Audio Gap] that we are able to leverage through all of our social media channels. In the China market, we are leading with the Regal brand there. We've got some wonderful relationships with key retailers to support our future market development, excellent distribution there now. We're cautious on how hard we roll out in that marketplace because we are supply constrained, but we've got great brand work going on with those retailers, establishing king salmon as the preferred species in the market and establishing the price points to underpin that super premium position. It's a great position to be in to be developing a market before there's any volume pressure. So I'm very satisfied with our progress to date there. Building on our specialty retail strategy for Omega Plus in the domestic market, that's going well for us through specialty retail. And we've also launched new Equine Oil into some selected thorough bred breeders in New Zealand. That's looking like a very promising product development for us. Just talking about some key brand highlights. These are just some fun facts. Ora King TYEE, we had the record TYEE for us this year, was 23.4 kilos. That's a huge fish, and that continues to be a hero product for us leading the Ora King reputation. Ora King was showcased at an exclusive industry event in Las Vegas earlier this year as part of the Formula 1 series. Our ambassador, Liwei Liao led that for us. And well, it just speaks volumes to the enormous brand power that Ora King has in that marketplace. Regal had an impressive uplift over the summer period across all social media channels compared to the year prior. 25 million views across Instagram and Facebook. Those numbers just absolutely astound me. It's hard to get our heads around how successful those programs have been. Year-on-year increase over 250% in reach, and we attribute a lot of that growth to our fantastic partnership with Chef Al Brown. Turning to some sales performance highlights. Look, overall, food service sector remains steady. It is still in a rebuilding phase globally. Retail sector was strong, and we saw overall volumes grow by 10% in that channel. Most of that growth was in the second half of this year as we had increased supply availability. North American demand continues strong growth from first half. Foodservice there remains buoyant and some additional retail sales provided more growth in half 2. Retail growth in New Zealand remains strong. Foodservice sector remains quite challenging with a slow recovery as I think everybody in New Zealand would see with our own eyes. Foodservice channel hospitality is still quite challenged. Despite these challenges, New Zealanders are still seeking premium protein, and we saw a 5% growth over the prior year. Australian market has shown very solid growth for us as well. Retail continues to grow for us. Wonderful key retail relationships there and plenty of opportunity to expand that with availability of more supply. Foodservice channel has proven to be very resilient there and supportive of our product in the face of some pretty strong headwinds in that sector across the Tasman too. Asian markets, excluding Japan, remain quite steady, majority of growth in performance coming from China. We continue to work together with our importer, China Resources, doing a wonderful job for us there to build our brand and in-market relationships, solid growth in this market, and we're confident of growth continuing there. Japan, still a very important market for us, has been steady in volume over the year, and that's very encouraging because we have put through some pretty significant price increases and yet we've had no deterioration in demand. And European market has just remained flat for us in food service, and we're quite okay with that.

Thanks, Carl. I'll jump in on fish performance now. So FY '25, we completed the second full year of our adapted farming strategy. And just to recap of that, it involves having the majority of our biomass in the cooler waters of the Tory Channel region over summer before relocating stock to the Queen Charlotte Sound, into that Ruakaka and Otanerau farms. Look, as previously noted, the positive biological performance, including lower summer mortality was repeated through FY '25. The harvest volumes for the year were just under 6,800 tonnes, which is within the expected range. And pleasingly, we also saw a slight increase in the average harvest size. Unfortunately, as we started FY '26, we have experienced some elevated mortality, and this has been coupled with some lower-than-anticipated growth rates. I'll go into a little bit more detail on that a little bit further on in the presentation, but that is going to result in a reduced harvest for FY '26. Look, we've stressed it a couple of times. It is important to note here that the mortality that we have experienced is nothing like what we have seen in the years gone past, but it does reiterate the constant and never-ending work that we need to undertake on fish performance. I want to just quickly point out feed pricing. Feed is our #1 cost. And over the course of FY '25, you will note that it was slightly higher than FY '24. However, pleasingly, over the last period, we have started to see the price of our feed fall in line with significant price reductions in some of our key commodities such as fish oil and fish meal. Our feed pricing is reviewed quarterly. So that is a nice tailwind coming our way. And then linked into feed, our trial facility at our Ruakaka farm was completed in December 2024. The first feed trial was underway from January. It is now just coming to the end. It's a crucial facility. King salmon is a minority species and having a trial facility on site allows us to do a lot of ongoing development work with our feed supply partners in a small replicable scientific manner. And automatically, the first trial has started to show some really encouraging results. So definitely a very encouraging and worthwhile investment that we have made there. I'll pass you over to Mr. Rodgers.

Thank you, Grant. Good morning, everybody. Starting off with sustainability and looking at some key highlights. The first one I would call out was we did submit our first climate-related disclosure in May 2024, and we are well progressed on progressing our second one in a couple of months' time. Even though Scope 3 is currently an optional exemption, we are reporting our Scope 3 emissions. This is because it does make over well over 90% of our greenhouse gas emissions. So we think it's important to acknowledge and recognize those. Even though for us as a business, there are some constraints around what we can do in that space as those emissions are predominantly related to feed, which comes from Tasmania and freight. So being an exporter at the bottom of the world, it does have some constraints from a greenhouse gas emissions perspective. A couple other highlights to draw your attention to was we did complete New Zealand's first in-house aquaculture fin ensilage plant, and essentially what that means is any biomass which does not -- which cannot be consumed in either the human food chain or the animal or pet food food chain, we can divert that from landfill now and turn that into a feedstock for a biogas facility in the North Island, which generates electricity. So for us, it's a really good example of a great financial outcome, a great social outcome and a great environmental outcome for New Zealand Inc. A couple of other points I would highlight would be we have done some work over the hydrology of our freshwater sites. That's critical both from a risk protection or risk mitigation perspective, sort of looking at flood and drought risk, but also with the significant investments we may be making in the future around Blue Endeavour, it's critical to understand where we should make those investments given the long-term nature and capital intensiveness of the salmon farming business. Outside of that, we continue to work with partners to help us with our thinking around how we can improve and how we can get better on our sustainability journey. Next slide, please, Graham. Moving on to financial performance, and Carl covered this pretty well earlier. From a GAAP perspective, it is really a story of the fair value movements on biological assets. So if you look at the -- so first couple of lines on the page, we did get good volume growth. We did get good revenue growth, but then you see that fall away on gross profit, which is connected to those fair value movements. The one thing I would say is those fair value movements do actually highlight are going to reduce harvest for FY '26, which will flow on to reduced profitability as those are forward-looking numbers. If we jump over to the pro forma numbers, which is what we guide to, it was pleasing to deliver a number of $29.7 million, which effectively is right in the midpoint of our guidance we gave this time last year of $26 million to $32 million or at the upper end of the guidance we gave with our half year results of $26 million to $30 million. At $29.7 million, I believe that is the best result in the company's history on a pro forma EBITDA basis, which is positive. But unfortunately, we do have a little bit of a half step backwards next year, which we will look to write during the year. If we focus on the pro forma EBITF or EBITDA walk from FY '24 to FY '25, it does make the business look incredibly simple. So we do have first green block of we had increased volume to sell. That was consistent with the fish performance Grant talked about previously, moving from a harvested biomass of 6,200 tonnes to 6,800 tonnes. Good thing about having more fish to sell is you're having a really competent sales force, which can go and sell it. We're still looking at focusing how we can improve our price, customer and product mix. A good example of that is at the moment we are looking at how we can optimize our whole fish to make sure we maximize the amount of whole fish we can sell. Even though whole fish does sell at a lower price point per kg, it is one of our highest margin products, if not the highest, given it does have lower processing and lower packaging, freezing and storage costs associated with it. To keep moving along. If we go to COGS, so yes, cost of goods sold has increased, and that is consistent with having to grow more fish. I would sort of pause there because I think this is a critical point for today that -- this chart should hopefully demonstrate any additional biomass we can generate is incredibly profitable or in my way of thinking, your last tonne of production is your most profitable. As a business, we have pretty high fixed costs and pretty high semi-variable costs. However, the converse is true where every ton of biomass we lose is incredibly destructive from a profitability perspective given those high overhead costs, which are fixed and semi-variable. A couple of other comments I'll just make on this chart is mortality. So mortality was up on last year, but pretty much in line from a percentage basis with our biomass, we were growing. So that mortality is in line with management's expectations. And corporate costs have increased. There's always a sticking point, but we believe we -- the investments we are making in this space are starting to demonstrate some green shoots. And the SFFF funding partnership Carl talked about previously, I don't believe that would have been possible without the investments we have made in our capability in that space in the last 12 months. Moving on to the balance sheet. Also, Carl has covered this morning. From a cash perspective, $26 million increase in net cash on hand. That's a function of profitability of the business. We have had some relief or release from working capital, mainly in the inventory space, which is a combination of holding less feed on hand, which was a consequence of changing feed suppliers last year as we work through those agreements. And in addition to that, we have been able to reduce the value of our finished goods on hand [Audio Gap] we will look to see what we can do to optimize our working capital to make sure we can release as much of that for cash as possible. From a CapEx perspective, we did invest $10.5 million in CapEx for FY '25. The main investments we talked about being our Blue Endeavour service vessel, new pens, new processing machinery and the standard things you'd expect from a salmon business. Even though we did spend $10.5 million, it was below the guidance we gave, and that's a tale of 2 stories, some of it being underspend, which we will incur in the future, which is timing related and also a good avoidance story. So the Marine Consents Extension Act, we estimate saved us around $2 million in consenting fees that is money we will no longer have to spend, which we are greatly appreciative of. A couple of points to finish off is in FY '25 we did utilize all our remaining tax losses. So the business is in a taxpaying position, which is something -- it is not a bad thing, means we're making money, which is great, but also contributing to the broader New Zealand story. Tax dollars are incredibly important for the country and pay for a lot of the stuff we want as a society. And last but not least, the biggest number on the balance sheet biological assets. We've talked about the fair value story, which is a function of the reduced harvest for FY '26. But also if you were to look at biomass at sea, we're roughly holding around 500 tonnes less of biomass at sea this year, which is a combination of having slightly less and slightly smaller fish when we compare that to this time last year. I will now hand back to Carl, who will take you through guidance for FY '26.

Thanks, Ben. Okay. So as we've indicated, guidance for the year is at $15 million to $24 million for the pro forma EBITDA. It's a result of mortality, first of all, we're currently experiencing slightly elevated mortality across several sites, although that mortality is reducing now. And that is going to impact the harvest forecast for the year, $59 million to $63 million is where we expect that harvest to come out. It has a compounding effect on EBITDA through the lost sales, the actual cost of the mortality and de-optimizing the remaining harvest, all of which we expect will impact earnings by about $11 million. Foreign exchange, currently favorable U.S. rate, very grateful for that, provides us with some margin upside given our exposure to North America, albeit that upside is a little bit muted due to our hedge position through forward contracts. And finished goods optimization remains a strong focus for us through this year. We made a good impact on that last year. Despite the impact of elevated mortality impacting this year's harvest and earnings, the guidance in the balance sheet provide a strong platform from which to develop and fund our future growth. The CapEx for this year forecast at $21 million made up of Blue Endeavour at around $12 million and the stay-in business CapEx of $9 million is consistent with previous guidance around BAU capital needs. And on top of the CapEx above, there is the increase in working capital for the BE pilot farm, which will be about $5 million. Overall, this will result in estimated cash outflow of around $7 million. The Board has reconfirmed that dividends will remain on hold for the foreseeable future as we develop the Blue Endeavour project. I will point out that none of the numbers that we referred to are reflecting any of the cash flow forecasts that will come from the SFFF grant. And I'll just now hand back to Grant to talk about fish.

Yes. Thanks, Carl. So obviously, as everyone is well aware, summer is and will remain the most challenging period for New Zealand King Salmon. But we just thought we'd put on a little bit of detail around our current situation and the current summer is not a significant outlier to our historical -- in historical context. And I'd argue that the changes we've made to our farming strategy is providing a level of resilience. The water temperatures throughout the last year have been quite elevated, particularly through February and March. And this is really a result of that coming through. When I look at the impact on harvest, it is twofold. So we have the issue of the elevated mortality, which you can see there is tracking to be slightly above the previous 2 years, but below many years. It's a type of fish that has died, which is a fish that is very close to harvest. And I mean then the greater impact, which is actually well over half the reduction in harvest is a result of a reduction in growth. Obviously, when fish are a little bit stressed, they reduce the amount that they're eating and therefore reduce the amount that they are growing, and that is having an impact. So we will be harvesting some slightly smaller fish and that obviously compounds through. So the 800 tonne reduction, half of that links back to growth as opposed to mortality. Just a reminder there of the strategy and the continued fish performance focus that we are undertaking, and that is we want to avoid summer as best as we can. So keeping fish in the Tory Channel. We've got ongoing work on vaccine development. We're doing some really nice work with our thermotolerance breeding. The first fish will go to sea in 2027 or 2028 that have got that trait selected for. The diet modifications and trials, which has really been stepped up with the deployment of the Ruakaka trial system, and that is ongoing. And then obviously got the investments in freshwater, particularly the RAS scenario there, which will allow us to put a large focus on [indiscernible] modification. So if I move to Blue Endeavour and our pilot update and where we are at. Look, this is a pretty exciting time for us. I think we are all cautiously optimistic, but I was naturally a little bit nervous. The fish are moving out to the nursery site at Waihinau next month and then will be relocated out to our Blue Endeavour farm in the end of October, start of November. So it will be the first time this has occurred in New Zealand for an open ocean fish farm, first time that it has occurred in the world from a king salmon farming perspective. So it doesn't come without significant challenges and work, but it does come with a lot of excitement. It's pleasing to report at the moment that everything here is tracking to plan. The pens are being constructed currently in Picton and that will be launched over the next few weeks before being relocated out to Waihinau. The mooring infrastructure is due in the country in the next month or so and will be installed in June. And then the fish -- the pens and fish will be relocated and installed on the Blue Endeavour site at the end of October and grown out for approximately 10 months to August, September. So it is next August, next September, we will be undertaking the first harvest from our Blue Endeavour site. So exciting times ahead in that regard and really looking forward to being able to focus in on some of those growth aspects. So that brings us to the end of our main presentation, and we'll move forward with some questions.

[Operator Instructions] Your first question from the phone today comes from Guy Hooper from Jarden.

I mean just to start on the guidance. And you mentioned it is fairly wide. Can you give us a bit of an idea what assumptions go into the bottom end of the top end? Because you look at 400 metric tons gap or range on the harvest, but $9 million earnings range?

It's Ben Rodgers here. I guess sort of wanted to try and point this out when we're doing the EBITDA waterfall. I don't have the exact number in front of me, but my estimation to probably be around over 5,000 tonnes, just over 5,000 tonnes of fish would probably be breakeven for us and the difference between the last sort of 2,000 tonnes is the difference between breakeven and doing $30 million EBITDA. So yes, unfortunately, for us, any loss of volume is challenging. The other point which Grant talked about is, generally speaking, from a foodservice perspective is those markets do prefer larger fish. So if you do have some growth challenges, it's just trying to estimate where the biomass will go and how much this is going to hurt us. So I guess I appreciate it is a wide range, and we will look to narrow it up. We did the announcement around the updated harvest 10 days ago, and nothing has really changed in the last 10 days to give us any more confidence on that other than that range still feels like the range at the moment.

Okay. No, that's fair enough. And just as we look forward, I guess, into '27, presumably, there will be some sort of hangover from a volumes perspective. I think you just mentioned before there that some of the mortalities were of fish closer to harvest. Does that maybe limit the impact into '27? How should we think about that?

Look, I'll jump in on that one there. Guy, so from a harvest volume perspective, no, this impact is very much sitting in FY '26, not in FY '27. We would anticipate that we should have a full rebound and be in and around 7,000 tonnes for FY '27.

Okay. That's some good color there. And then just on the CapEx side, I mean, the $21 million of CapEx for Blue Endeavour, you've got the government funding and presumably, that funding is tied to specific projects. Can you give us a bit of sense as to, I don't know whether or not some of that funding relates to the $12 million into next year? Or maybe even just give us a bit more detail on exactly how we should think about the funding and when it comes in to you guys?

Yes. There's probably going to be a few strands to that one, Guy. The first one is from an accounting perspective, the funding relates to a few streams. So there's no funding attached to the service vessel. That's something we pay for ourselves, but there is some funding attached to the pens, moorings and infrastructure. So we would -- we can sort of send an invoice to the government when we pay for those in terms of demonstrate our [indiscernible] some funding back from the government. From an accounting perspective, the revenue recognition of that is linked to the useful lives of those assets. So we still need to work through that. So in terms of the first part of the funding, it is linked to the CapEx, that is the eligible CapEx. The second part of the funding will relate to fish or biological performance of the site. So that funding will probably be linked to sort of 12, 24 months away when we actually have fish at the site and we see how they perform. So if the site -- if the pilot goes incredibly well, there's less funding than the $11.7 million. And if it goes incredibly bad, it's capped at $11.7 million.

Okay. Maybe a follow-up on that then. How much of that $11.7 million or like how much is linked to infrastructure spend versus performance of the farm?

I have to come back to you on that one. But in terms of the CapEx project, there is CapEx linked to the pens, the moorings, there's CapEx or funding to the RAS, no funding to the service vessel. So just the RAS and the infrastructure at the Blue Endeavour site. And the other project, which is wrapped up is our genomics work.

[Operator Instructions] As there are no further phone questions at this time, I'll now pass back for any webcast questions to be addressed.

Yes. Thanks. First question, I'll throw this to Grant. "Will there be a substantial harvest from the BE pilot in '26 in FY '26-'27?"

So the first harvest from -- thanks, Ben. The first harvest from the BE pilot is scheduled to be coming in around August, September 2026. So that will be coming in, in FY '27. Look, we always conservatively say that the volume of the harvest will be 0 to 500 tonnes. We are piloting it for a reason. I mean as we learn and understand it. I would -- we are confident, but the farm is almost set to provide some challenges that we have not yet envisaged that we will overcome as we go through it. But that will come through in FY '27. So yes, up to 500 tonnes of harvest for -- from the BE pilot.

Thank you. I'll continue with Mr. Lovell. "Regarding fish feed, is it economically feasible to partner with a New Zealand company to build a feed plant in New Zealand?"

It's a great question and one that is regularly raised. Currently, the New Zealand industry is actually just too small to sustain a feed mill plant. It has been looked at in the past. Generally, a feed mill plant requires in excess of 60,000 tonnes of feed manufactured for it to be viable. The New Zealand industry is currently at about 15,000 tonnes of a tailwind. We need to double our output before that's probably going to become financially viable for the country.

All right. Next question. "Is the business vulnerable to tariffs from America?"

Okay. It's a good question. I'll have a go at answering that. Look, firstly, I don't think we should be boxing too hard at shadows. Tariffs seem to be on one day and gone the next day. Look, our view about the tariffs is if they get imposed on New Zealand salmon, then they're likely to be imposed on all salmon. I think it's unlikely we would be singled out just ourselves. But irrespective, if there's a tariff put on our salmon, we will be passing that through. We have no intention of absorbing any tariffs. Now we're a little bit protected in that our consumers in North America are at, let's say, the higher end of discretionary spending. Particularly given a lot of it goes through food service, premium food service channels. So we've probably got a bit of insulation there. But if there is any degree of demand falling off if consumers are substituting to alternative proteins, then we will simply redirect that volume to other strategic growth markets, which means Australia, China, and we'll be able to do a little bit more, I suspect, with retailers in New Zealand. So I am not particularly worried whether the U.S. chooses to put tariffs on us or not. Hopefully, they don't. But if they do, yes, so be it, we'll just -- we'll work with it, we'll roll with the punches and we'll use the opportunity to redirect that volume elsewhere.

There's a few more questions online, but I'll just jump back to cover the question from Guy. So in terms of the $11.7 million, the split is $5 million CapEx and $6.7 million operational costs. The $5 million CapEx is split -- sorry, $3 million to the BE pilot site and $2 million to the RAS. Right. Our next question. "What is the limiting factor for China in importing more salmon from New Zealand? Is it the pricing of Atlantic salmon?"

Great question, actually. It might depend on who you talk to. My view is it's multifactorial, as everything is in this business. One is supply constraint. We could do a lot more to China, I believe, if we have the volumes to do it. We've just [indiscernible] growing the China market means we're having to reallocate fish from other markets. And we've just got to be careful about how hard we prime that engine because if it takes off, we simply don't have the supply to back it up. So it's a bit of supply constraint. But most certainly, Atlantic Salmon has been doing a lot more work, particularly Norwegian salmon and more lately Chilean Atlantic Salmon in developing the market there. And king salmon is not a particularly well-known species, unlike North America, where it's a native indigenous species and consumers already have a good knowledge of king salmon. We still have to build the awareness of what the king salmon species is and educate consumers that it is worth paying a lot more for than an Atlantic salmon, sometimes up to twice the price by the time it goes through retail. So look, I think the constraints on selling into China is purely a matter of how fast we want to drive that volume and how fast we want to -- we invest in building the species recognition, the brand recognition and getting consumers to trial king salmon because we know, look, once you put a king salmon in the people's mouth and they compare it to other species, there really is no comparison, that champagne versus, I don't know, [ Chateau De Carbonneau ]. Sorry to say that about Atlantic Salmon, I shouldn't bang them out. But we are [indiscernible] of the sea and consumers, once they try it, they recognize that.

Okay. Not as a question, just a comment really on fish mortality, just sort of says, it's disappointing happening again. So for Grant, probably just commenting again on those actions we're taking to resolve it.

Yes. Look, no one ever wants to see any level of mortality. But I think it's also very important to reiterate back to that graph that we showed there that it is a slight elevation, but definitely above what we had modeled and planned and that work on fish performance is an ongoing never-ending process, and that's going to be both in terms of our stock. So work on the breeding program, our diet, very much with regards to the work that we're doing with our feed companies. And automatically, we are definitely seeing some immediate benefits from our trial facilities. We're doing a trial there with our core feed supplier, 3 separate diets and one of them is significantly outperforming the other 2. So these aspects are always going to be an ongoing aspect. And then it's also just having a hard look at our ongoing strategy and how we put fish to sea and when and how we pull them out of the water. We're confident that we will be able to create solutions and mitigate going forward.

Thanks, Grant. And part 2 of that question was just around do any Board members have any plans to acquire shares? So, look, I appreciate the question, but would not be appropriate for me to talk about potential purchases of shares by our directors. The last question we have online is, "How does management view sockeye salmon trials in New Zealand? And is this a possibility for New Zealand King Salmon?"

Interesting question. Look, I don't fully understand the rationale for the sockeye trials. However, I'm sure that the company that is doing that has very sound reasons specific to these circumstances. So I can't really comment on that. However, from our perspective, we think king salmon is a fantastic species. We think the global demand for king salmon has a lot of capacity for expansion. So we don't think there's any risk of oversupply anytime soon or even longer term. We think the market development opportunities are enormous for it. So we don't see for our business any benefit in taking on another species with its own unique farming challenges as well. Grant, do you want to add to that?

Yes. Yes. I will just jump on that too. Also if we were to develop a sockeye process, you are -- it's a very long-term process. You have to develop food stock and this is going to take up both time, energy, space and money within our scarce resources that are better allocated to king salmon. So look, wish the guys down south all the luck on that one, but it's not something that we're looking at heading towards.

And that completes the questions online.

That's it?

Yes, that brings us to an end.

Excellent. Thank you very much, everyone, for attending the presentation and look forward to having you all online again next year, I hope, and a more positive outlook again. Thank you.

Thank you. That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.