Michael Wolthers, a freight forwarder with Kintetsu World Express (Canada) Inc., said Wednesday that Chinese demand for the tasty Canadian crustaceans has eclipsed the European market.
“We had a phenomenal amount of business through January into early February shipping lobsters to China,” said Wolthers, Kintetsu’s manager for the region.
He estimates Kintetsu and four competitors have shipped a total of about a million kilograms of lobster to China already this year.
“It is at least as large as Europe at Christmas,” Wolthers said. “China is by far a bigger market than Europe is now.”
His company, which moves about 30 per cent of the province’s lobster, has already shipped about 300,000 kilograms of lobster to China this year.
“The last two weeks of January (we were shipping lobster) at a blistering pace,” Wolthers said.
“We put three trucks a week on the road, loaded with anywhere between nine and 10 tons each heading for Toronto to make connections out of Toronto on direct Air Canada flights, for the most part, to China. We were flying it out of here as much as we could. There was way more than we could. Ultimately, out of Halifax, in a containerized service, there’s four flights a week.”
He said the service out of Halifax is also Air Canada, but it’s limited to about 50 tons a week.
“It just wasn’t enough,” Wolthers said.
The truck-and-plane option still had lobsters landing in Beijing, Hong Kong and Shanghai within about 43 hours, he said.
“There’s still strong demand in China,” Wolthers said. “We’re still probably shipping close to (30,000 to 35,000 kilograms) a week to China right now.”
By comparison, in the entire year of 2009, Wolthers shipped 339,000 kilograms of lobsters to China. That’s only 39,000 more kilograms than he’s already done this year.
“That’s how much the market has changed,” said Wolthers, adding he now ships an average of 100,000 kilograms of lobster a month to China.
Rodger Cameron does so much business with China that he hired a man who speaks Mandarin and reads Cantonese about a year and a half ago to work at his Halls Harbour lobster pound.
“When the Australian rock lobster came under pressure, being in short supply, it caused the Chinese buyers to look elsewhere for an alternate product,” said the president of Cameron Seafoods (2005) Ltd.
China’s flourishing economy and growing middle class has a lot of Chinese “eating more affluent-type foods,” he said.
“The two things sort of happened at once,” Cameron said. “Their economy took off, plus the Australian lobster
supply was depleted.”
Dealing with the Chinese market presents challenges, he said.
“Their cultural differences are tremendous,” Cameron said. “After being in the business here for 20 years, they’re probably the toughest group to deal with price-wise in negotiations.”
He gets enquiries from China on a daily basis. But he’s taking his time growing that market because lobsters need to be high quality to survive the trip.
“Probably 70 per cent of the catch might be fit to go there. So as my business increases, I have to find a home for the other 30 per cent,” Cameron said.
“Generally, we would send those to New Brunswick or other processing companies to just freeze them or turn them into meat. That’s generally a losing proposition, especially now at, say, a $5 (per pound) boat price. That’s a big-time losing proposition.”
