| Abstract |
Despite its youth, aquaculture is faced with market difficulties which make profitability of the activity more and more difficult to reach. Time is long gone when the price ofsome top-grade sea products was very high and the demand seemed limitless. In a context of uncertainty concerning economic conditions, institutional rules and characteristics of the demand, it is very important to have tools to facilitate decision-making by investors, bankers, entrepreneurs, researchers and public-policy makers. The first tool we propose is the market analysis. This is necessary to check adequacy between supply and demand. It is aimed at describing the present state of the market for a range of products (origin, characteristics, seasonality, volume and price) in order to focus the target on the aquaculture project. The second tool is the project analysis. This method makes it possible to have a good knowledge of what will be produced in terms of cost and quality, by taking into account the comparative advantages given to this project. A full range of criteria has to be presented to evaluate the project from different view-points : return on investment, financial feasibility during the first years, profitability on the long run and breakdown of production costs. Thanks to these links between project analysis and market analysis, it is possible to assess the possibilities to look for price-competitiveness and quality-competitiveness when entering the market. This method has been applied to scallop in France and sea-bass projects in Greece. As far as scallop is concerned, the results show that price-competitiveness is impossible to reach and that the market to attain is the market for raw shell-off scallop. For the sea-bass, it is very difficult to choose quality-competitiveness because of the difficulty to make products' differentiation while the impo rtance of natural endowments in the production costs gives comparative advantages to southern Mediterranean countries. [NOT CONTROLLED OCR] |
