Production & market structure

Context for reading the price pages — who farms these two species, where the fish actually goes, and which flows are invisible to EU data
Mediterranean production, 2024
Thousand tonnes. APROMAR, covering the Mediterranean universe including North Africa.
CountrySeabass (kt)Seabream (kt)Total (kt)Role in the EU price
Türkiye160140300 The price-setter. Supplies the large majority of EU imports of both species.
Greece4758105 The EU-internal benchmark. Commands a persistent premium over Turkish fish in Italy.
Egypt344478 Essentially all domestically consumed — large in volume, near-absent from EU trade.
Figures are APROMAR's Mediterranean series. FEAP totals differ and will look smaller, because FEAP's coverage excludes Egypt and Tunisia. Neither is wrong — they count a different universe, and mixing them produces a total that matches no source.

Egypt is big, and it does not move the EU price

On volume alone Egypt is the third-largest producer in the Mediterranean basin, and for seabream it is close to Greece. Almost none of it reaches Europe. Egyptian aquaculture supplies a large domestic market, and the country appears in EU import statistics only in small quantities. This is the single most common error in reading the production tables: ranking producers by tonnage and assuming the ranking describes competitive pressure on European prices. It does not. For the EU price, the relevant supply is Turkish and Greek, with Tunisia, Albania and Morocco at the margin.

The Russia gap

Roughly a quarter of Turkish seabass and seabream exports go to Russia. That flow is invisible in every dataset on this site, because EU customs records only what crosses the EU border and Turkish national statistics are not published at a usable cadence. The practical consequence is that a fall in Turkish arrivals into the EU does not necessarily mean a fall in Turkish production or harvest — it can equally mean fish being redirected. Weekly EU import volumes should be read as a measure of what Europe is receiving, never as a proxy for what Türkiye is producing.

Seasonality

Both species follow a broadly similar annual pattern, with supply into the EU peaking around March and reaching its thinnest around November. The mechanism is harvest scheduling against water temperature and the timing of stocking, not demand: consumption in the large Italian and Spanish markets is comparatively stable through the year, with a lift around Christmas. Because the seasonal amplitude is large relative to week-to-week noise, a single week's move should be read against the same week in prior years rather than against the week before it.

Why Italy matters most

Italy is the largest consumption market for both species, and the Milano bulletin is the only source on this site that quotes origin against size class in the same table. That makes the Greek-versus-Turkish spread directly observable rather than inferred, and it is why Milano anchors the demand side of this benchmark even though it publishes weekly rather than daily.

Naming

The same two fish carry different names in each market covered here, and those names are how the trade actually refers to them: European seabass is branzino or spigola in Italy, lubina or robalo in Spain, bar or loup in France, and levrek in Türkiye. Gilthead seabream is orata in Italy, dorada in Spain, daurade royale in France, and çipura in Türkiye. The market pages use each market's own terms alongside the English names.