Global aquaculture production has been rapidly growing in recent decades, and while there has been significant attention given to the species being produced in which country, less attention has been given to the companies actually conducting the production. We know that in some sectors they are all small, while in some sectors like salmon and shrimp at least some companies are becoming very large. In this paper we have access to firm data on production for all major salmon producing countries from 2010, as well as data on the wild salmon fisheries.
We report production development by species, showing how farmed Atlantic salmon is becoming increasingly dominant, and how the relatively constant landings of wild fish make this sector an increasingly marginalized part of the salmon market. We use Herfindahl-Hirchman Indexes (HHI) to measure concentration in a number of settings. We start by computing HHIs for the five largest farmed salmon producers. Not surprisingly, these are lowest for the largest producers – Norway and Chile, and higher for the smaller ones. We continue by computing global HHIs first for Atlantic salmon, then all farmed salmon and then all salmon including the wild salmon. The concentration declines with the wider selection of species, indicating that these sectors consist of smaller companies than the farmed Atlantic salmon. This is particularly the case for the wild fisheries.