Methodology — Iceland Fisheries

What this page covers

The Iceland pages present eight Icelandic fisheries companies across fiscal years 2020–2024, set in industry context: national catch and quota data, export statistics, stock advice, and species-level volumes and prices. Every company financial figure is extracted from a public filing and carries its source document and a confidence level; every industry series names its statistical source.

This document is the source of truth. If a dashboard figure and this methodology disagree, the methodology wins; the dashboard is regenerated from the same inputs.

The Norway side of the dashboard has its own methodology page, built on the same principles against Norwegian registries.

Scope — the eight companies

The eight companies span pelagic-focused and mixed (groundfish + pelagic) operations. The Pulse page's sector-footprint panel compares their combined annual-report revenue with the total revenue of the Icelandic fishing and fish-processing sector (Hagstofa table SJA08109, which covers all Icelandic entities in the sector).

Wherever a company filed consolidated group accounts (samstæðureikningur, “sr”), those are used — they capture the full economic entity including subsidiaries. Standalone annual accounts (ársreikningur, “ars”) are the fallback where no consolidated filing exists for a year. The filing behind every figure is recorded and shown in each company's source table on the Companies page.

The financial window is fiscal 2020–2024. Quota and stock-advice series extend further — quota shares run to the 2025/26 fishing year and the advice cycle carries the most recent published advice — so the industry-context pages can be more current than the filed financials.

Sources of record

All company financials are from audited annual accounts filed with Skatturinn (Iceland Revenue and Customs), retrieved from the public registry of annual accounts (ársreikningaskrá). Listed companies (Brim, Síldarvinnslan, and — since its December 2023 listing on Nasdaq Iceland — Ísfélag) file by end of March following each fiscal year; privately-held companies file by end of September.

For listed companies, filings with Skatturinn are corroborated against investor-relations disclosures. For privately-held companies, the audited filing with Skatturinn is the source of record; external secondary-source corroboration is inherently limited for non-listed companies.

Revenue and net profit are reported at the consolidated group level, which may differ from parent-attributable figures shown in some external databases by the minority-interest component.

The dashboard does not reflect events after each company's last filed fiscal year.

Financial definitions

All eight companies are presented under one set of definitions, applied uniformly. Where a printed report presents a line under the same name but a narrower definition, the dashboard's definition takes precedence; this is a disclosed definitional choice, not an extraction discrepancy.

• Revenue — the company's own stated total operating revenue (rekstrartekjur), including genuine other operating income (aðrar tekjur — for example quota-sale or quota-lease income), net of intra-group transactions.
• EBITDA — operating profit (rekstrarhagnaður, EBIT) plus depreciation and amortisation (afskriftir), computed from the income statement for every company. Some printed reports publish an “EBITDA” line that excludes gains on asset or quota sales; the dashboard recomputes so all eight carry the same definition.
• Net profit — the after-tax result for the year, as filed.
• Employees — as disclosed in the annual report (full-time equivalents where the filing states them, headcount otherwise).
• Revenue per employee — ISK revenue divided by the employee count, both from the same filing. The industry reference line on the per-employee chart is the median of the eight companies.

Extraction & verification

Financial values were extracted from the filing PDFs in three stages: programmatic table extraction first; page-image reading (a vision-capable AI model) where the layout defeats table extraction; and human verification of the output against the source pages. Every extracted value carries its source document, page, extraction method, and a confidence level — hover a source cell in a company's source table for the filing file name and extraction method.

June 2026 audit. Every core financial cell was re-read first-hand from the source statement PDF in a dedicated audit pass. The audit changed 49 cells across seven companies — most were alignments to the uniform revenue and EBITDA definitions above (differences typically between +0.1% and +7%). A final independent re-read of the audited cells returned 35 of 35 clean.

No value is ever estimated or interpolated. A figure the filing does not state renders as unavailable rather than as a zero or a guess.

Currency & FX conversion

Six of the eight companies report under IFRS in a functional currency other than ISK — three in EUR (Brim, Samherji, Vinnslustöðin) and three in USD (Síldarvinnslan, Eskja, Ísfélag); two report in ISK (Loðnuvinnslan, Skinney-Þinganes). Two distinct conversions are involved, and they deliberately use different rates:

1. Report normalization (EUR/USD filing → ISK)

Filed values in EUR or USD are converted to ISK once, at extraction time, using the Seðlabanki Íslands year-end mid-rate (last December trading day) of each fiscal year:

Original report values in EUR or USD may differ by 1–5% from the dashboard's converted figures due to FX convention composition (the reporting company's own average-rate and closing-rate mix versus a single year-end rate).

2. The currency display toggle

The Nominal ISK / Real 2020 / USD / EUR toggle re-expresses the ISK figures for display:

• Nominal ISK — the normalized filing value, unchanged.
• Real 2020 — each year's nominal ISK value multiplied by that year's annual consumer-price-index factor, rebased so 2020 = 1 (for example, 2024 values are multiplied by 0.768). CPI: Seðlabanki annual series.
• USD / EUR — each year's nominal ISK value divided by the Seðlabanki annual-mean rate for that year. Note this is a different convention from the year-end rate used for report normalization above — annual-mean is the standard convention for re-expressing a full-year flow in another currency.

If a CPI factor or FX rate is missing for a year, the value renders as absent rather than approximated. Ratios, percentages, tonnages, and counts are not affected by the toggle.

Comparability breaks

Three company series contain structural breaks. The dashboard marks each break year with a “(b)” flag — the break-in-series convention used by Eurostat and SDMX statistical publications — and repeats the note wherever the figures appear: a chip on the company profile header, flags on year cells in summary and source tables, a dashed series-break marker on the charts, and the full note in chart tooltips. CSV exports carry the plain values with the flag glyph stripped.

• Ísfélag, 2023 onward — the merger with Rammi hf. completed in 2023; the company roughly doubled in scale. 2023 onward is not comparable to 2020–2022.
• Eskja, 2023 onward — the groundfish arm (Eskja Bolfiskur) was split out in 2023, and reporting switched from consolidated (sr) to standalone (ars) at the same time: a scope and report-type break versus 2020–2022.
• Loðnuvinnslan, 2024 — subsidiaries were merged into the parent at the start of 2024 (sameinað félag), so 2024 is a merged single entity rather than a consolidation. Economically continuous, but the legal and reporting structure changed (sr → ars).

A break flagged this way should not be read as organic growth or contraction; it is a change in what the series measures.

Catch, quota & advice data

Industry context comes from the national statistical and regulatory sources, each named beside its chart:

• Monthly landings — Hagstofa table SJA01101 (landings by species and month). Hagstofa publishes monthly landings with a lag of under two months; the Pulse freshness and pace indicators state the latest published month they reflect. The Sea page's per-species panels draw on the same table, with independent per-species scales.
• Sector accounts — Hagstofa table SJA08109 (revenue of the whole Icelandic fishing and fish-processing sector), the denominator of the Pulse sector-footprint share.
• Exports — Hagstofa table SJA04901 (demersal export trends).
• Quota shares — Fiskistofa hlutdeildir (each company's percentage share of the national quota per species), followed across seven fishing years, 2019/20 to 2025/26, on the Compare page. Quota status (aflamarksstaða), quota trades (viðskipti með aflamark), landings records (landanir), and the vessel registry come from Fiskistofa as well; company-level figures aggregate the vessels registered to each company. Groundfish quota follows the fishing year (1 September–31 August); several pelagic allocations follow the calendar year.
• Fishing regulations — closure and regulation geometries from Fiskistofa, served via the Náttúrufræðistofnun GeoServer (CC BY 4.0). The Pulse regulations card counts currently active instruments and states the most recent instrument date.
• Stock advice — the latest total-allowable-catch advice per pelagic stock from ICES, Hafró (Hafrannóknastofnun), and the joint IMR-PINRO advice for Barents Sea capelin, with NEAFC recommendations for factual TAC figures. The Research page holds the underlying advice-document corpus (88 documents across the four sources) with per-document filters.

Data vintages

Annual reports: through fiscal 2024 · Hagstofa sector accounts: as published 2026-03-31 · Hagstofa exports: as published 2026-04-13 · Fiskistofa landings: through fishing year 2025/2026 · page built 2026-06-08. The bar at the foot of every dashboard page carries the same vintages.

Species volumes & prices

The Species page shows monthly landed volume and value per species from Hagstofa table SJA09042 (catch and catch value by species, landing port, and month; all-ports total). The realized price is the value divided by the volume for each month — a landing-side price, not an export or contract price.

Real ISK is the default price basis. Each month's nominal price is deflated to December 2024 prices using the Seðlabanki monthly consumer price index. This is deliberately a different deflation from the financial pages' Real 2020 toggle (annual CPI, 2020 base): monthly series get a monthly deflator anchored at the most recent CPI month the data covers.

The series starts at 2000 — the source table's monthly detail before 2000 is not reliable enough to publish — and the default view opens at 2010 with the full history reachable by dragging the zoom window.

Missing data & confidence

Every extracted financial value carries a confidence level, visible in each company's source table:

• High — read directly from a clearly readable statement table.
• Medium — some interpretation was needed (for example, a value assembled from more than one statement line, or read via page-image extraction).
• Low — ambiguity was noted at extraction time, or the value comes from a secondary source.

Figures a source does not disclose render as unavailable — never as zero, and never silently filled.

AI-assisted features

Three parts of the Iceland side use AI, and each is labelled where it appears:

• Company summaries — the per-company text on the Companies page is AI-generated from the extracted filing data and shipped with the dashboard. It is labelled “AI summary — generated from the filings above” with the note that it is not audited content; the tables above it are the source of record.
• Ask AI — an assistant grounded in the extracted dataset (40 annual reports across the 8 companies, plus quota and export data), answering with citations back to sources. In the published build the assistant is offline; the interface says so, and all dashboard data is unaffected.
• Advice-narrative extraction — on the Research page, stock-advice narratives are extracted from ICES, Hafró, and IMR-PINRO advice documents with a vision-capable AI model; structured numbers come from the ICES Stock Assessment Graphs API.

All AI-derived text on the dashboard passes the same editorial-voice checks as the rest of the interface, and no AI output feeds any numeric series — numbers come only from the filings and statistical sources named on this page.

Privacy & analytics

1. This site uses first-party, cookieless analytics and shares no data with third parties.
2. A random identifier is stored in your browser's local storage only to classify a visit as new or returning; the identifier itself is never transmitted to any server.
3. The new-or-returning classification derived from that identifier is the only signal sent, and it is recorded as an aggregate statistic rather than linked to an individual.
4. No cross-site or cross-application tracking is performed; the identifier is scoped to this site alone.
5. Reporting shows aggregate audience statistics only, with no profile that could isolate an individual visitor.
6. Under the EU ePrivacy Directive (Article 5(3), per EDPB Guidelines 2/2023) and Iceland's Electronic Communications Act nr. 70/2022, storing this identifier falls within the terminal-equipment storage rule, so this notice and an opt-out are provided.
7. You can remove the stored identifier at any time by clearing this site's data in your browser, or with the Usage analytics switch in the dashboard's settings menu (gear icon) — switching it off also removes the identifier.

The stored identifier is time-limited to 13 months from the date stamped on it; after it expires, a later visit stores a fresh identifier and counts as new. These measurements run on the dashboard page itself — the standalone methodology, operator, and price pages load no analytics script.

The statement of legal basis in point 6 is subject to legal review.

Sources

Company investor-relations pages (for the listed companies) are used for corroboration, not as the source of record.