Marine Harvest, the world's largest fish farmer, is confident it can cope with short-term challenges created by Russian sanctions that are hurting the fish-farming sector, it said on Wednesday.
Norwegian fish farmers, which mostly raise salmon, have been hit by share price falls over the past month after their biggest market banned some food imports from Western countries in retaliation for the West's sanctions in response to the Ukraine crisis.
Marine Harvest's shares have fallen by 4.5 percent over the past month, against a 2.2 percent fall for the Oslo benchmark index, but CEO Alf-Helge Aarskog said he is confident the business is well positioned to deal with the short-term challenges.
Emphasising his confidence, the company proposed the quarterly dividend of 1 Norwegian crown per share, citing record production and profit in the period.
Operational earnings before interest and tax reached 1.22 billion Norwegian crowns ($198 million), in line with the 1.2 billion crowns announced in a preliminary report in July and about double the year-ago figure.
The company, however, posted a pretax loss of 387 million crowns because of a one-off writedown of 1.1 billion crowns on the fair value uplift of its harvested fish, partly because of lower market prices for salmon.
