FY26 Financial Results
)Adjusted EBITDA nearly tripled to ₹371 crore and gross margin expanded to 23.5%; company on track for ₹10,000 crore in revenue in FY27
Captain Fresh, the global packaged seafood company, today reported its results for the financial year ended 31 March 2026.
Consolidated net revenue rose to ₹5,169 crore ($574 million) in FY26, 1.5 times the ₹3,397 crore ($377 million) reported in FY25. Adjusted EBITDA nearly tripled to ₹371 crore ($41 million), from ₹136 crore ($15 million) in the prior year. Gross margin expanded by 6.5 percentage points to 23.5%, from 17% during the same period. The company remained profit-after-tax (PAT) positive for the second consecutive year.
Captain Fresh operates a house of seafood brands across Europe and North America. Its European processing footprint spans Frime in Spain, Koral in Poland, Senecrus in France and CFT in Denmark (through a joint venture), making it the largest seafood processing infrastructure in Europe operated by an Indian company. While in Europe the concentration is on ready-to-eat formats, in North America, the company distributes through CenSea, Ocean Garden, and Ocean Edge, primarily in ready-to-cook formats across foodservice channels.
The company sources from more than 30 countries across three oceans, led in FY26 by Ecuador (17%), Indonesia (15%), India (12%), Vietnam (9%), Norway (7%), Chile (4%) and Mexico (3%). The largest single origin accounts for under a fifth of total supply, a spread that limits the company’s exposure to trade policy shifts and disruption in any one country.
“Seafood is 15% of the animal protein the world consumes. Yet, its largest company sits below $10 billion. Poultry, beef, pork and dairy have each produced companies three to five times that size, because those categories were engineered into predictability decades ago. Seafood remains what it always was: too many origins, too many species, too many formats. It is simply too complex for a single-line business to hold together, and just as messy an experience for the customer,” said Utham Gowda, CMD and Group CEO, Captain Fresh.
“Our answer has been a house of premium brands, each a leader in its own lane and each still run by the operators who built it. The Captain Fresh platform is the connecting tissue: shared sourcing and commercial infrastructure that makes each brand worth more inside the Group than outside it. This, I believe, is now one of the largest transatlantic seafood platforms in the industry, connecting European processing prowess to North America, the deepest seafood market in the world. FY26 is the first year I see this coming through in the P&L,” Gowda added.
“FY26 stress tested the industry in the form of tariffs and an unsettled trade environment, and we came out stronger than we went in. ROCE (Return on capital employed) has moved from 9% to 11%, and we are targeting north of 20% in FY27. On leverage, our debt-to-equity ratio is currently 1.6, which is conservative for a business that has grown at 80% CAGR over the last three years,” said Mathew George, Group CFO and Whole-time Director, Captain Fresh.
“Of the ₹2,300 crore of debt on the balance sheet in FY26, only ₹440 crore is a long-term obligation and the rest is working capital financing. Our receivables are all insured; none are disputed. In FY26, we consciously carried higher inventory to protect customer supply through a period of global disruption. That reverses as the environment settles, and the goal is to take inventory turns up from 2.9 and bring the debt-to-equity ratio to between 1.3 and 1.5,” George added.
On where the next phase of growth comes from, Gowda said, “We serve nearly 2,500 customers, including more than 50 of the largest seafood buyers in the world, with some spending $2 to $3 billion a year on the category. We hold a fraction of that. Growing our wallet share, species by species and format by format, is the whole plan. Margin expansion was the FY26 priority, and every step further into ready-to-eat takes it further. We delivered ₹1 crore of EBITDA a day through FY26 and are close to ₹2 crore a day today. Ahead of us is a lifetime of work to build an institution in this category that can become one of the largest lean protein companies in the world.”
The company added that it is on track for revenue of ₹10,000 crore ($1.1 billion) in FY27. With the platform it set out to assemble now largely in place, Captain Fresh said its principal focus for the year ahead is scaling what it already owns.
