19 April 2011
El Salvador Source: El Financiero El Salvador. The tuna cannery Calvo Group announced the investment of USD 4 million to replace equipment at the facilities and to hire 300 new temporary workers in the next six months to expand production.
Manuel Calvo, Managing Director of the Spanish company in El Salvador, said the new workers will be posted in a second production shift, because expects to be catching more fish in the Salvadorian Pacific by that time.
With these 300 jobs tuna, theSalvadorian plant will increase its workforce reaching 1,600 jobs and a cumulative investment of USD115 million since it arrived in the country in 2002.
The investment will also open new export markets for canned tuna in Colombia and other countries in the Caribbean Basin, which will join the recently opened markets in Belize and Canada.
So far, exports to Canada in 2011 have reached USD 300,000, but the idea is to increase this share, the same as that of the U.S. market, where the Calvo Group opened a sales office in Houston in 2009, to make the most of the Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA).
From 2009 to 2010, Calvo annual exported an average of USD 2 million to the U.S. market Calvo said.
Last year, Calvo exported USD 68 million from El Salvador, equivalent to 27,000 tons of tuna to 20 countries.
