Buyers and Sellers Summit: Logistics and India-EU FTA Outlook
The Buyers' & Sellers' Summit aims to bring together decision-makers from the world's leading shrimp exporters and importers, as well as senior purchasing teams from major retail and foodservice companies. Designed as one of the industry's most commercially focused sessions, this year's summit will explore the market forces, trade dynamics, and strategic shifts shaping the future of the global shrimp business.
The session will open with a keynote presentation by Philip Grey of Drewry Shipping Consultants on the latest developments in the global reefer market. Philip will examine how ongoing geopolitical tensions and conflict are affecting the reliability, costs, and resilience of shrimp logistics across the world's major shipping lanes. In the panel discussion that follows, he will be joined by Thue Barfod of Maersk and Richard Houtkoop of Share Logistics to discuss the implications of the conflict in the Middle East for global shrimp trade and supply chains.
The focus will then shift to India. Ahead of the lunch break, Pawan Kumar of the Seafood Exporters Association of India will deliver a keynote on how the future India–EU trade relationship may develop following the signing of what many have called the "mother of all deals" between the two blocs. He will be joined by Venkatesh Palani Samy of the Indian Embassy in Brussels and Katarina Sepic of Seafood Europe for a panel discussion exploring the opportunities and remaining barriers in India–EU shrimp trade. The conversation will also address Europe's widespread practice of adding substantial levels of glaze to frozen shrimp products and the unintended market consequences this may create.
Following lunch, the summit will take a deeper dive into the Indian shrimp industry itself. Despite repeated predictions that India's shrimp sector would lose momentum, the industry has consistently demonstrated remarkable resilience. This was again evident in 2025, when exporters faced both US tariff shocks and intensifying competition from Ecuador in the HLSO and peeled shrimp segments. This session will examine how India's shrimp farming and processing sectors are adapting to these new market realities, and what these shifts could mean for the future competitiveness and positioning of Indian shrimp exports. This session will be followed by an invitation-only networking session from 5.45-6.45 pm CET in the venue's sky lounge.
The Buyers' & Sellers' Summit will conclude with a forward-looking discussion featuring some of the world's leading shrimp processing equipment suppliers. Because equipment manufacturers are often the first to detect changes in investment patterns, their order books and project pipelines can provide valuable insight into where the industry is heading next. As exporters invest in new technologies and value-added processing capacity, this session will explore how product baskets may evolve across different producing regions — and what that means for the future structure of the global shrimp market.
