Owned capacity here is a test of what a Manufacturer builds and controls rather than of what it can buy on contract, and the 40 percent weight at the centre of the Aquaculture Farming Owned-Capacity Index is passed by the two largest entries on this page through opposite ends of the same chain: Mowi owns the feed that goes into its cages and CPF owns the genetics that go into its hatcheries. The other two weights sit at 30 percent each, one for category purity and the production share of revenue, one for global brand reach and reported financial performance, and none of the three can be satisfied by a tolling agreement.
What The Dimension Counts. Before any company was ranked, the research behind this page removed pure brand operators, private-label traders and businesses that depend on OEM or ODM contract manufacturing, which is why the ten cards here read Manufacturer instead of the looser vocabulary used for consumer-facing lists. What remains is a physical inventory: sea cages and ponds a company built, land-based recirculating systems and RAS halls it operates, feed mills it owns, automated processing plants it runs and the tonnage it actually harvests. Mowi, the top card at 89, reports 559,000 tonnes of Atlantic salmon harvested in 2025, guidance of 605,000 tonnes for 2026, 29 secondary processing plants and 582,000 tonnes of feed produced in its own mills, enough to cover 100 percent of what its European farming regions need. That last figure is the cleanest illustration of the dimension, because feed is the largest single cost line in salmon farming and Mowi books the margin on it instead of paying it away.
Where CPF Earns The Same Weight. CPF, also on 89, owns a different kind of asset. It holds the specific-pathogen-free whiteleg shrimp broodstock line it developed itself, hatcheries and farming bases in 17 countries, more than 126,000 employees and about US$18.2 billion of revenue, the largest own-book figure on this page. Its farming model is a closed, high-density industrial system run on probiotic lines rather than open ponds, and the genetic line is what keeps it there. A competitor can buy shrimp postlarvae on the open market every cycle; CPF does not have to, and under a 40 percent weight that difference is worth more than an extra farm site would be.
Where The Test Bites. The counter-example is easy to describe and shows why the dimension is written as it is. A company that buys postlarvae and feed on the open market, leases cages from a permit holder, sends its harvest to a third party plant and sells the result under a label it owns could book a respectable revenue line and still score near the bottom of this dimension, because none of those four steps leaves an asset on its books. Land-based capacity is judged the same way: a recirculating hall is credited to whoever paid for it, which is why Cooke's large-smolt RAS expansion in North America carries weight while a lease on the same building would not.
Why The Weight Is Written This Way. The dimension is deliberately an asset test rather than a scale test, because a trading house can move more seafood than any of these ten while owning almost none of the production. Buying feed, leasing cages and subcontracting processing leaves a company with revenue and without the thing this index measures. That is also why the spread on this page is narrow: the highest score is 89 and the lowest is 83, and the gap between them is made of facilities, licences and harvest tonnage rather than of sales volume.
The score belongs to the legal entity printed on the card, so Cermaq is read on the US$1.2 to 1.5 billion it earns itself and CPF is read on the roughly US$18.2 billion it reports, and the resources of Mitsubishi Corporation and Charoen Pokphand Group do not move a single point across the ownership line. Cermaq is a wholly owned subsidiary of Mitsubishi Corporation, the Japanese trading house listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange under 8058, and Cermaq itself has no listed equity. CPF is a SET-listed company under the controlling stake of Charoen Pokphand Group. Both are real industrial operations with cages, hatcheries and processing lines that group capital helped build, and neither of them is scored as though it were the parent.
The Rule Behind The Refusal. Scores of 90 and above are reserved for companies whose own revenue clears the 2025 Fortune Global 500 entry line of US$32.2 billion, whether by appearing on the register or by publishing a figure above it. Membership belongs to the company that files the consolidated accounts and does not pass down to a subsidiary or a division, so a parent's place cannot be borrowed. Not one of the twenty companies ranked across the two aquaculture pages is a Fortune Global 500 member, and CPF, the largest of them on its own books at about US$18.2 billion, reaches only about 57 percent of the entry line.
What The Ten Cards Actually Read. Mowi 89, CPF 89, Tongwei 88, SalMar 88, Cooke 88, Lerøy 87, Bakkafrost 86, Cermaq 85, Guolian 84 and AquaChile 83, with the highest score on this page at 89 and the lowest at 83. Cermaq's own US$1.2 to 1.5 billion is among the four smallest figures here, and it is the reason the card sits eighth even though the company harvests across Norway, Chile and Canada and lifted its own capacity target to 280,000 tonnes. A parent balance sheet is not part of that calculation.
What Does Cross The Line. Ownership is not irrelevant to these companies, it is simply not scored. Mitsubishi's trading network gives Cermaq access to feed ingredients, freight and Asian buyers, and group capital stood behind its purchase of Grieg Seafood's farming assets in British Columbia, Newfoundland and Finnmark in July 2025. Charoen Pokphand Group supplied the reach behind CPF's aquatic bases and processing plants in 17 countries. Those advantages reach the scorecard through the operating results of Cermaq and CPF, which is where the index picks them up; a rank earned on a consolidated group revenue says nothing about either subsidiary.
The Same Discipline In Both Directions. AquaChile is unlisted and wholly owned by Agrosuper, the Chilean food group, and it is scored on US$1.45 billion of its own revenue, which is what puts it tenth at 83 rather than higher. Cooke is a family company with no listed equity at all, reports CAD 4.0 billion, about US$3.0 billion, and still ranks fifth at 88. Ownership structure changes how much a company has to disclose and how much capital it can call on; it does not change whose revenue is being counted. The reverse error matters just as much, and it is the reason this page never adds a parent's turnover to a subsidiary's: Mitsubishi's consolidated revenue already contains Cermaq's, and counting both would report the same tonne of salmon twice.
Tongwei puts photovoltaic panels on the water surface and cages underneath, and the 30 percent category purity weight reads that arrangement as a genuine production asset on one side of the ledger and as a diluted revenue mix on the other, which is why the company sits third on 88 rather than at the top of this page. Nothing in the index forbids a Manufacturer from running a second business; it simply declines to pay for one.
What The Purity Weight Measures. The dimension asks how much of a company's revenue comes from aquaculture and its directly supporting categories, spanning freshwater and marine farming, speciality species, seedstock and feed, smart farming equipment and frozen aquatic products. Tongwei reported RMB 84.128 billion, about US$11.7 billion, for 2025, and the agriculture and aquatic segment inside that total contributed close to RMB 30 billion, about US$4.1 billion. The gap between the two numbers is the score: a company whose revenue is one species, one chain and one set of buyers reads as pure, while a group in which aquaculture is roughly a third of the top line reads as partial.
What The Fish Ponds Still Earn. The 40 percent owned-capacity dimension is where the same model is credited. Tongwei runs more than 80 aquatic feed mills of its own and holds feed capacity above 10 million tonnes a year, the largest volume position in the industry, and its solar-over-water sites turn tens of thousands of hectares of water into owned and demonstration farming area with automated feeding and sensor-based water monitoring underneath the panels. Those are built assets, not purchases, so the dimension counts them at full weight and the company keeps a high score in spite of the mixed revenue.
The Cost Of The Second Business. Diversification brought a financial penalty that belongs inside the 30 percent brand and reported-performance dimension. Polysilicon and module overcapacity pushed the group to a phased consolidated net loss across the 2025 to 2026 financial year even as the aquatic and feed side kept generating steady cash. A single-species salmon farmer on this page never carries that exposure, and the Chilean and Faroese entries carry biological risk instead. The index treats the loss as a fact about reported performance rather than as evidence that the ponds are weaker, and the same 88 is attached to this legal entity wherever it appears on the site, because one company keeps one score.
Purity Alone Buys Nothing. The reverse reading of the same weight is worth stating, because a single-species farmer is not automatically ahead. SalMar harvests 300,900 tonnes of Atlantic salmon and reports NOK 30.05 billion, about US$2.9 billion, which is close to the purest revenue profile on this page, and it sits on 88 rather than 89, held back by a smaller revenue base in the 30 percent financial dimension. Purity is one input among three, and a company with a narrow, clean chain and modest sales trades places with a diversified group that owns more physical capacity.
Where The Verdict Falls. Tongwei's aquatic business is a Manufacturer's business by any reading: it owns the mills, the seedstock programme and the water. What it does not own is a clean revenue profile, and the 30 percent purity weight is the price of that. Solar-over-water is not marked down as a gimmick here; it is simply not aquaculture revenue, and the weight is calculated on revenue.
A licence is a right tied to one body of water and capped by biomass rules, while a vessel can be chartered, replaced or moved between regions inside a single season, and that asymmetry is why the Faroese and Chilean entries on this page are constrained by regulation rather than by ships. Physical capacity in this industry has two halves, the equipment a Manufacturer builds and the permission it holds to use a specific fjord or bay, and the 40 percent owned-capacity weight can only credit the second half where the first one exists legally.
The Faroese Case. Bakkafrost controls about 50 percent of the farming licences in the Faroe Islands and harvested 106,823 tonnes of large Atlantic salmon in 2025, fish sold at a premium for size. It backs that position with a fishmeal and fish oil plant at Havsbrún, so the feed that shapes flesh quality is made inside the group, plus large land-based smolt halls that shorten the time each fish spends at sea. Revenue was DKK 7.007 billion, about US$1.03 billion, and the first quarter of 2026 brought DKK 2.114 billion with net profit back at DKK 307 million. The same licence system that protects the Faroese position works against the company elsewhere: its Scottish farming unit booked an operating loss on environment and biological mortality, and no amount of equipment compensated for a harder body of water.
The Chilean Case. AquaChile holds hundreds of farming concessions across three southern regions and five large processing plants, with capacity of 200,000 to 230,000 tonnes and revenue of US$1.45 billion. It is the largest salmon producer in Chile and supplies close to a third of Chilean salmon exports to China, around US$280 million a year, yet it carries the lowest score on this page at 83, held there by a revenue line smaller than its peers and by two risks outside its control: seasonal algal blooms in the southern fjords and a proposed tightening of environmental biomass limits. Regulatory headroom is the ceiling, and the ceiling moves without the company's consent.
Why The Buying Started. If licences cannot be manufactured, they have to be acquired, and the 2025 to 2026 wave on this page is exactly that. Mowi lifted its holding in Nova Sea from 49 percent to 95 percent at an equity value of NOK 16 billion, raising its long-run production ceiling above 650,000 tonnes. SalMar agreed to buy 70 percent of Måsøval for about NOK 3.4 billion, adding cages and quotas in central Norway. Neither deal was about ships, plants or brands.
What A Licence Does Not Fix. Holding the right water is necessary and not sufficient, and the reported figures on this page show the distance between volume and earnings. SalMar harvested 81,800 tonnes in the second quarter of 2026, a rise of 33 percent, and booked operating EBIT of NOK 1.237 billion on it, while Cermaq raised its harvests and still saw nine-month net profit fall to JPY 7.1 billion as spot salmon prices came off. Neither result turned on a ship or the lack of one.
Why The Fleet Argument Fails. Cooke owns more than 800 farming and service vessels across 14 countries, the largest such fleet of any company here, and it ranks fifth at 88 rather than first, because a boat carries fish and people rather than permission. Its binding constraint is the renewal of open-cage permits in Washington State and comparable reviews in Atlantic Canada. The highest score on this page is 89 and the lowest is 83, and the distance between them is set by how much legal water a company controls, not by how many hulls it floats.
Prepared shrimp dishes are a gain for Guolian wherever the plant that makes them belongs to the company and a dilution wherever the value migrates into marketing, which is the line this index draws when it excludes pure brand operators and contract manufacturing from the page altogether. Guolian is ninth of ten here on 84, one place above AquaChile, and the reason is arithmetic rather than any judgment about its cooking.
What The Company Owns. Guolian runs industrial recirculating nurseries for shrimp, deep-sea cages for golden pompano, a central kitchen built for prepared aquatic dishes and integrated fine-processing capacity above 100,000 tonnes a year, with close to 8,000 employees. Revenue was RMB 5.1 billion, about US$0.72 billion, and more than 65 percent of it is earned inside China, which makes the company far less exposed to the tariff and freight swings that hit shrimp exporters. Every asset in that list is a factory, a hatchery or a cage, so the 40 percent owned-capacity weight treats the prepared-dish line as production rather than as a brand exercise, and that is the correct reading: a fillet portioned, seasoned and frozen in a company-owned hall is a manufactured good.
Where Dilution Begins. The 30 percent purity weight watches the revenue mix, and ready-to-cook dishes sit at the consumer end of the chain, carrying packaging, marketing and retail margin that have nothing to do with aquaculture. A company that shifts its mix toward those products raises gross margin and lowers its purity reading at the same time. The exclusion rule at the top of this research cuts the other way as well: if the dishes were designed in-house and produced by a contracted factory, none of that revenue would count toward owned capacity at all, and the company would stop looking like a Manufacturer and start looking like a brand owner.
The Contrasts That Set The Boundary. Mowi carries consumer products at the end of a chain it owns completely, with 29 secondary processing plants and its own branded retail packs, and no reader mistakes it for a marketing company. Cooke sells through the True North Seafood distribution brand while owning hatcheries, feed mills and 30 automated plants. Bakkafrost goes the other way and sells large whole fish at a premium without a consumer brand in front of it. All three are counted as Manufacturers because the physical assets come first and the label comes second.
Why Recognition Cannot Carry The Score. There is no separate marketing dimension in this index, so a familiar brand helps only through the 30 percent weight that also carries reported financial performance. Guolian's retail and foodservice visibility for its shrimp and tilapia lines is real, and it still cannot lift that weight alone, because the dimension reads revenue, margin and reach together and recognition does not move a revenue line. The same rule explains why Bakkafrost sits on 86 with premium whole fish that most shoppers would never recognise in a store.
How The Score Reads It. Guolian's 84 is not a penalty for making prepared food. It reflects the smallest revenue base on the page apart from AquaChile, which limits the 30 percent dimension that weighs global brand reach and reported financial performance. The company's own direction is to push further into high-value processing, and under this index that move is neutral to positive for as long as the central kitchen stays on its own books. The moment production moves outside and only the brand stays inside, the page has a different word for the business, and it is not Manufacturer.
