Friday, September 20, 2024

The Peter Pan fire sale

Rodger May, half owner of the collapsed processor Peter Pan Seafood, has won an auction for an assortment of the company's remaining assets, edging out a competing bid from Silver Bay Seafoods.

A notice filed in King County Superior Court in Seattle, where Peter Pan is being liquidated through receivership proceedings, indicates May bid $37,324,000 to Silver Bay's $37,067,320.

Results of the bid are subject to court approval.

May's bid consists of a $25,324,000 cash component and a $12 million credit bid, court papers show.

Here's a table designating the purchase price for individual assets.

Some of the prices seem shockingly low for properties once regarded as crown jewels in Alaska's seafood industry. For example, the price for the huge King Cove processing plant is $200,000 cash ($1 for the real property and fixtures, and $199,999 for the equipment and machinery).

The Dillingham processing plant has a purchase price of $11 million, but only $3 million of that in cash.

The most expensive sale item appears to be equipment and machinery in the Port Moller processing plant, priced at $8.75 million cash. This makes sense, as the Port Moller plant was rebuilt in 2018 following a fire.

Will these Peter Pan assets function again as they once did? That remains to be seen.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

"It's stupid the way people extrapolate the past. And not slightly stupid, but massively stupid." Charlie Munger

Anonymous said...

What is wrong with Rodger May? Nobody will ever fish for him.

Anonymous said...

He may try to run it, but certainly not with himself in charge. There are a couple of one-hit wonders out there, with salmon experience, that might be able to help him and at the same time recapture their past glory.

But more likely, he parts it out. Dillingham is the plum. Likely bidders would be SBS, OBI (their westside plant acquired from Snopac is junk), and even Trident (the Independence will likely be retired soon and if they want to stay in Bristol Bay they need to replace that capacity). And then there are the aforementioned wonders who just may want another crack at direct ownership.

Moller has a lot of new equipment with tremendous value. That can be removed and the carcass sold to SBS to use as a support base for their northside gillnetters.

The Seattle real estate has value to any number of people for various uses.

The real dog of the show is King Cove. It hasn't run for a year and no doubt needs major work to get it going again. It lacks freezing capacity which kills their bottom line in the June fishery. And they lost or pushed out their Bering Sea trawlers, so kiss that pollock goodbye. As for the resident southside fishers, it would be hard if not impossible to pry the best of them away from SBS.

It will be interesting to see how it plays out.

Anonymous said...

A very well-informed post. Thanks.

Anonymous said...

Interested third parties remain John Lowrance and Joe Kelso with Hickman resurfacing.

Also, oddly, Pacific.

But, as said before, SBS remains the most likely group running Dillingham and Moller in 2025.