Mowi and Guangdong Haid Group both finish on 89 points, and the pair is the hardest test of what the 45% brand-and-sales weight measures, because one sells salmon to shoppers while the other sells feed and fry to the people who grow the fish. Mowi booked EUR 5.73 billion, about US$6.2 billion, in FY2025, and almost all of it is aquaculture: 559,000 tonnes of Atlantic salmon harvested, roughly a fifth of world supply, 582,000 tonnes of its own feed produced with European farming sites 100% self-sufficient, 29 secondary processing plants, direct operations in 26 countries, exports to more than 70 countries and 12,500 employees.
Set the two revenue bases side by side and the tie stops looking accidental. Haid's turnover is nearly three times Mowi's at RMB 116.0 billion, about US$16.2 billion, but aquatic feed, seedstock and the farming chain running off them contribute a little more than 40% of it. Forty percent of US$16.2 billion is about US$6.5 billion, which lands within a few percentage points of Mowi's entire turnover. The two companies reach the top of this table with almost the same quantity of money earned from aquaculture, and they earn it in opposite directions: Mowi captures the retail price of a finished fillet under a consumer mark, Haid captures a margin on the inputs that let hundreds of thousands of farmers produce shrimp and freshwater fish at all.
What the weights then do with that difference. Brand influence and global sales carry 45%, and both companies are plainly global on that measure, Mowi through a cold-chain brand recognised in retail, Haid through more than 600 subsidiaries, over 35,000 staff, feed capacity above 30 million tonnes and shrimp and fish fry supplied in the tens of billions of fry each year. Category fit carries 35%, and there the two separate: Mowi's books are close to pure aquaculture, while Haid's are a farm-input platform in which aquaculture is the largest single block but not the whole of it. Haid's breadth and Mowi's purity cancel out at 89 points.
The same model is graded one point lower further down the table. Tongwei lands on 88 with RMB 84.128 billion, about US$11.7 billion, more than 80 feed mills, aquatic feed capacity above 10 million tonnes, and water that carries solar panels above the pens and fish below them. Its aquaculture business is at least as large as the one Haid runs, and yet a group whose consolidated result swung to a loss on polysilicon in the 2025-2026 financial year asks the 45% sales weight to read a number its fish did not produce. That is the price of a dual business inside a single score.
What the tie cannot express. Both companies are 89, and the score is silent about the different ways each could fail. Mowi's revenue is exposed to one price series, the spot price of Atlantic salmon, so a bad year arrives at once and in full. Haid's rides on the buying power of a very large number of small farms, so a bad year arrives slowly, through credit and through demand for inputs, and shows up first in receivables rather than in turnover. A dresser of a single species and a seller of farm inputs share a number because the index asks what a brand earns and how much of the business sits inside the category, not how concentrated the risk is. Read the top two places as equally strong on the dimensions being measured, and as opposite bets on where farmed protein goes next.
Because the only thing that opens the 90-to-100 band is a company's own revenue clearing the Fortune Global 500 entry line, and on these two tables none of the ten is a Fortune Global 500 member. The 2025 register drew that line at US$32.2 billion. A company qualifies here by appearing on the register, or by publishing revenue above the line on its own accounts. Nobody in this series does either, so both pages stop at 89, and the reason is arithmetic rather than editorial.
The nearest miss is the largest company in the series. CPF reported THB 571.135 billion, about US$18.2 billion, which is roughly 57% of the entry line, and it sits on the manufacturer table rather than this one. The largest company on this page is Haid at RMB 116.0 billion, about US$16.2 billion, and it ranks 183rd on the 2026 Fortune China 500. That is a Chinese register built from Chinese filings, and it does not put Haid on the global list, because the two are compiled on different scopes of revenue and answer to different thresholds. A place on one is not a place on the other, and this page does not treat it as one.
Nor does a parent's place travel down to the company being scored. Cermaq is wholly owned by Mitsubishi Corporation, and CPF sits under Charoen Pokphand Group. Membership belongs to the entity that files the consolidated accounts, and a subsidiary does not inherit it, because a parent's turnover includes businesses the subsidiary has no claim on and would credit the operating company with money it never books. Scoring Cermaq on Mitsubishi's revenue would be the same error as scoring a bottler on the sales of the brand owner. The rule also runs in the other direction: Mowi at 89 is credited with its own EUR 5.73 billion and nothing else, even though group capital sits behind much of what the salmon industry builds.
What the boundary leaves intact. The highest score on this page is 89 and the lowest is 82. The band runs from Mowi's US$6.2 billion down to Joyvio's US$0.67 billion. The cap explains why no amount of scale in this industry reaches the 90s yet, and it works as a filter rather than a ranking device: US$32.2 billion is the size of a mid-sized industrial group, while aquaculture now supplies 52.5% of the aquatic protein the world eats inside a seafood market measured at about US$498 billion, and the largest company in this series books US$18.2 billion, under 4% of that market. Fish farming is capital-hungry, tied to named water, split across species and jurisdictions, and supplied by hundreds of thousands of small producers, and no company has yet turned that fragmentation into the turnover a global register measures. Until one does, the top of an aquaculture table will be an 89, and the contest that matters sits inside a seven-point band, from Mowi and Haid on 89 through Maruha Nichiro, Cooke, Tongwei and SalMar on 88, Leroy on 87, Nissui and Bakkafrost on 86, to Joyvio on 82.
SalMar spends to put salmon where coastal licences do not reach, Bakkafrost spends to make the fish bigger before it touches salt water, and the two bets are aimed at different risks rather than competing for the same one. They sit at 88 and 86, one band apart, and both are buying capital assets whose payoff is a decade out.
SalMar's wager is capacity. Ocean Farm 1, a semi-submersible pen built for open water, and Smart Fish Farm behind it, move production off the fjord grid. SalMar harvested 300,900 tonnes in 2025, the first time it passed 300,000, guides to 350,000 tonnes in 2026 and took 81,800 tonnes in the second quarter of 2026 alone, up 33% year on year, on operational EBIT of NOK 1.237 billion. Mid-2026 mortality ran 47% below its own ten-year average. Turnover was NOK 30.05 billion, about US$2.9 billion, on roughly 2,500 staff, and the company raised NOK 2.75 billion of green bonds against the offshore programme. The asset does not yet push unit cost below a well-run coastal pen; what it buys is headroom in a country that is not issuing new coastal licences at this scale, which is the constraint that caps everyone else in the industry.
Bakkafrost's wager is control over the sea phase. The company runs Havsbrun, its own fishmeal and fish oil plant, and large land-based smolt facilities, and it puts fish into the water already weighing what smaller smolts need months to reach. It harvested 106,823 tonnes in 2025, weighted to 5-kilogram-plus salmon that carry a premium, controls about 50% of Faroese farming licences, and turned DKK 7.007 billion, about US$1.03 billion, into DKK 2.114 billion of revenue and DKK 307 million of net profit in the first quarter of 2026 alone. Fewer days at sea means fewer days exposed to lice, algae and warming water, and its Scottish arm, which ran an operating loss in 2025 on environment and mortality, is being repaired with the same big-smolt method.
Neither bet is really a technology story, which is how both are usually told. They are capital-allocation decisions with different payback geometry. Offshore pens buy a growth option in geography that regulation has not yet priced. Land-based smolt systems buy biological insurance and faster turnover of the sea sites a company already holds. Full grow-out on land remains the least proven of the three approaches, and the companies expanding there, Cooke among them with large-smolt facilities in North America, are paying today for an option on a cost curve that has not arrived.
The test that separates the two is what happens when the capital stops. A coastal pen pays back within a few years and can be written down; an offshore platform and a hatchery estate are sunk into named sites with no second-hand market. SalMar's green bond and Bakkafrost's multi-year hatchery programme both commit money before the biology has answered, and the two have taken opposite positions on how much of that risk to hold at once: SalMar concentrated capital in a small number of very large structures, Bakkafrost spread it across many small ones. That difference, more than the equipment, is the part a rival would have to copy, and it is why an index that gives 20% to infrastructure and supply-chain control places both within four points of the leaders on assets rather than consumer brands.
Both purchases buy the same scarce asset, a right to put fish in a named stretch of water that no amount of capital can manufacture, and the price each buyer paid is shaped by what it already owns around that water. Mowi lifted its stake in Nova Sea from 49% to 95% at an equity valuation of NOK 16 billion. The deal takes Mowi's long-term harvest ceiling above 650,000 tonnes from the 559,000 tonnes it took in 2025, and the asset being consolidated adds about 52,000 tonnes of annual harvest capacity, which prices a tonne of yearly capacity at roughly NOK 300,000 on that valuation.
Read the two Nordic deals as different transactions rather than the same one twice. Mowi was not buying geography: it already farms in 26 countries, and Nova Sea sits in the north of Norway where Mowi has operated for years. It was buying the rest of a company whose volumes it partly counted and whose earnings it largely did not, moving from 49% to 95% of the harvest, the cash flow and the biomass. SalMar agreed in July 2026 to acquire 70% of Masoval AS for about NOK 3.4 billion, and its logic runs through its own plants: Masoval's sites sit in the same central Norwegian region as SalMar's operations and its InnovaMar and InnovaNor processing parks, so the extra tonnes arrive where feed, harvesting and processing capacity already exist and are sized to grow. SalMar's 2026 guidance of 350,000 tonnes needs sites to fill it, while Mowi's move reduces the number of counterparties it has to negotiate with.
Why the asset cannot simply be built. Norway and the Faroe Islands allocate a limited biomass to each site, and coastal licences are effectively no longer issued at the scale these companies grow, so expansion has to be bought from another holder at a price that holder sets. That is the mechanism behind the 2025-2026 wave, and it also explains Bakkafrost, which holds about half of the Faroe Islands licences and therefore harvests 106,823 tonnes of premium salmon from DKK 7.007 billion of revenue without acquiring anyone.
Two prices for two different things. Nova Sea's valuation near NOK 16 billion, for a producer contributing roughly 52,000 tonnes a year, is a price for consolidation at scale: Mowi already held 49% of it and knew the assets, the sites and the people. Masoval's NOK 3.4 billion for 70% is a price for a foothold in a region where SalMar wants its next tonnes to land beside its own plants. Neither figure is a build cost, because there is no build option to price against. What is really being compared is not cost per pen but cost per tonne of permitted biomass, and in both cases the buyer is paying a seller who knows that no new supply of that permission is coming.
The catch is that a licence is also a permission. Supply-chain control and infrastructure carry 20% of this index, and licence portfolios fit that weight awkwardly: they are intangible, tied to one jurisdiction, reviewable and repriced by politics, while the mills, pens and processing parks the weight was written for can be counted and visited. That is why Bakkafrost converts DKK 7.007 billion of revenue into 106,823 tonnes of premium salmon and still scores 86, and why buying Nova Sea does not lift Mowi above 89. An index that reads brand and sales first treats permits as the floor beneath a score rather than the score itself: a licence decides how many tonnes a company is allowed to sell, and the brand decides what those tonnes are worth.
Cooke at 88, Maruha Nichiro at 88, Nissui at 86 and Joyvio at 82 are scored on four different qualities of evidence, and reading them together says more about how this index behaves than any single number does. A brand table has to compare companies whose books are not comparable, and this quartet is where that problem becomes visible.
Cooke publishes its own figure and little else. It is a family-held business with no listed equity, and the CAD 4.0 billion, about US$3.0 billion, shown here is the number the company puts out rather than a consolidated statement anyone outside can audit. What stands behind it is substantial: roughly 13,000 employees, 30 automated processing plants, more than 800 farming and fishing vessels, operations in 14 countries, and close to 100 acquisitions over its history, among them Tassal at US$1.1 billion and Omega Protein. Its 88 rests on that record plus a distribution brand in True North Seafood, and on a revenue figure no third party verifies. A private company's silence is not a reason to score it lower; it is a reason to say plainly what the score rests on.
The two Japanese general traders are the opposite case: fully filed accounts, with farming as a minority of what they do. Maruha Nichiro reported JPY 1,078.6 billion, about US$7.1 billion, with record operating profit of JPY 30.4 billion, 12,479 staff, more than 50 large processing centres, cold stores and farms across 15-plus countries, annual volume above 1 million tonnes, and the closed egg-to-harvest cycle for bluefin tuna. Nissui reported JPY 830.0 billion, about US$5.5 billion, on roughly 10,000 staff and more than 40 aquatic sites in 12-plus countries, and it farms above 80,000 tonnes of silver salmon and yellowtail against more than 600,000 tonnes of aquatic volume handled, which makes farming about an eighth of the fish moving through it. Both are trading houses with farms attached, so the 35% category-fit weight holds them at 88 and 86 even though their turnover is larger than Cooke's. Leroy, seventh on 87 with NOK 34.36 billion, about US$3.25 billion, shows the same effect from another direction: the second-largest turnover among the salmon farmers here after Mowi, on a harvest of 195,000 tonnes against SalMar's 300,900, which tells you how much of its revenue is processing, distribution and wild catch rather than fish it grew.
Joyvio marks the floor, and the floor measures the balance sheet rather than the asset. RMB 4.8 billion, about US$0.67 billion, is the smallest revenue on this page, earned by roughly 3,000 staff from 60,000 to 70,000 tonnes of Atlantic and coho salmon raised in Chilean hatcheries and pens and sold increasingly into Chinese chilled distribution. The permits and the fish are first-rate; the debt taken on to buy Australis Seafoods, and the legacy of Chile's over-quota dispute, are what hold it at 82. An index built on brand and sales cannot separate a company that earns little from one that earns little after interest, and on a table that stops at 82, that difference is most of the distance between last place and the middle.
