Alliance Select Foods Inc. plans to sell more tuna products to the United Kingdom to further expand its presence in the European Union.
Alliance Select said in a statement with the Philippines obtaining a GSP+ (generalized system of preferences plus) status in 2015, the company would attract more clients because of the competitive price it could offer.
“The UK is one of the leading destinations of processed tuna in the EU and Alliance Select is well-positioned to meet that demand,” Alliance Select president Raymond See said.
The European Union is listed as top two in the world in terms of the tuna import market while the UK is among the top five importing countries in the EU.
Philippines exports to the EU in 2015 rose 27 percent to €743 million.
The UK is the fifth biggest export market of the Philippines. Latest data from the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources showed that the Philippines exported 17,324 metric tons of fishery products valued at P2.4 billion to the region
About 29 percent of the seafood supplies in the UK is imported, with the top two species consumed being salmon and tuna.
Alliance Select earlier said it would focus on improving operations and maintaining financial stability to bring positive financial results for the company in 2016.
The group’s strategy has started to pay off as the company improved its net income by over 2,700 percent in the first quarter of the year to $519,000 driven by an improvement in the firm’s gross profit margins.
The improvement is attributed to new management’s optimization efforts in 2015, including strategies to secure lower cost raw materials, execution of cost-cutting initiatives across all areas of operations, and improvement of customer relationships.
“We are very encouraged by the company’s first quarter performance. The meticulous clean-up and aggressive cost efficiency efforts implemented by new management beginning 2014 are now steadily bearing fruit, and we believe that these efforts will continue to sustain the company as we contend with the coming challenges of 2016 such as the ill-effects of El Niño and anticipated steep increase of fish cost,” See said.