Top shrimp company Minh Phu makes its move: a new Ca Mau plant that changes Japanese procurement

On June 28, 2026, in Ca Mau province at Vietnam's southernmost tip, the Minh Phu Group's new plant, the 'Minh Phu Khanh An Seafood Processing Plant,' officially came on line. The investment is about 1.5 trillion dong (about US$57 million, about 8.8 billion yen; a rough estimate at the time of writing of about 155 yen to the dollar and about 60 yen to 10,000 dong), annual processing capacity is 35,000 tonnes, and the plan is for employment of over 5,000. Japan is the third-largest export market for Vietnamese shrimp, and Mitsui & Co. holds a 35.1% stake in Minh Phu. It may look like the story of a single plant in Ca Mau, but it is in fact news directly tied to the shrimp procurement of Japanese food buyers. This article digs into what this new plant brings to supply to Japan.

On June 28, a '35,000 tonnes a year' shrimp plant started up in Ca Mau

According to the Vietnam Association of Seafood Exporters and Producers (VASEP) and local reporting, the new plant was built on a roughly 4.95-hectare site within the Khanh An Industrial Park in Ca Mau province, with a production building area of 24,500 square meters. For the Minh Phu Group it is its sixth processing base. At the opening ceremony, Ca Mau province's leadership positioned it as 'a facility that raises the province's processing capacity and supports the improvement of export value.'

The significance of the location is not small either. Ca Mau province recorded over US$2.4 billion in seafood exports in 2025 and is one of Vietnam's largest shrimp-supply areas. Placing a large processing plant in the very midst of the farmed-shrimp producing area makes legible the aim of minimizing the distance from raw-material procurement through processing to export.

Sorting and shelling both fully automated, nobashi shrimp at 70–80% — inside the plant

According to the local paper Tuoi Tre, at the new plant the processes of size sorting, color sorting and shelling are each fully automated, and the process for nobashi shrimp (a processed product whose tendons are cut and stretched for tempura) has also reached an automation rate of 70–80%. As its name suggests, nobashi shrimp is a product category almost exclusively for Japan's food-service and prepared-food sectors, and the very fact that automation investment was concentrated on this process is that the new plant was designed with the Japanese market strongly in mind evidence of that.

Behind this are rising labor costs and price pressure from the buyer side. VASEP points out that the Japanese yen has fallen about 40% against the dollar over the past few years, squeezing the purchasing power of Japanese importers. To keep selling into a market where price increases are hard to pass on amid a weak yen, there is no choice but to absorb with machines the processing costs that had relied on manpower — the 1.5 trillion dong investment is the answer to that.

The Minh Phu Group has over 13,000 employees and had export value of about US$542 million in 2025. It exports to about 50 countries, with the US and Japan as its main markets. In 2019, Mitsui & Co. acquired about a 35.1% stake, linking it to Japanese commerce at the capital level.

Shrimp trade with Japan and Minh Phu's position, in numbers

We organize the figures we could verify on the scale of the market this expansion will affect.

The structure in which over 90% of exports to Japan are processed products is a decisive difference from Ecuador and India, which attack with low prices on raw material as is. In the Japanese market for January–April 2025, Vietnam grew at a pace exceeding fast-chasing Indonesia (US$101 million, +9.4%) at over US$150 million (+12.6% year on year), keeping its lead. With both countries growing volume, it is a phase where the gap in processing capability translates directly into competitiveness.

From 'an open, airy workplace' to 'strengthening the position of an export base' — the local reception

At the opening ceremony, Minh Phu chairwoman Chu Thi Binh said of the new plant's design that it raises productivity while providing employees with a spacious, open working environment. It is a comment that lets the reality of the local labor market show through — that to maintain employment on the scale of 5,000 stably, the workplace environment itself becomes a competitive edge. Ca Mau province's leadership welcomed it as 'an important milestone that promotes the province's economic growth and boosts Vietnam's seafood exports.' In addition, the shareholder Mitsui & Co. has, since joining as an investor, set out expanding sales of Minh Phu products into the Japanese market, so Japanese commerce, too, had been waiting for this expansion.

Implications for Japanese food buyers — how to use the 'spare supply capacity'

1. Securing 'slots' for processed shrimp becomes easier

The newly built capacity of 35,000 tonnes a year is an expansion that rides directly on Vietnam's export structure to Japan (a processed-product ratio of 90% or more). Until now, production slots for tempura nobashi and sushi shrimp tended to tighten in the year-end demand period, but with the start-up of the new line, which concentrated automation investment on processes for Japan, room to negotiate volume security and shorter lead times in the busy season widens. On the point of a major shrimp processor's strategy toward Japan, the move in which a major on a par with Minh Phu aims at the sushi-topping market with tilapia (A major shrimp producer heads into Japanese sushi toppings with tilapia, a new source of white fish) is of a piece, and it should be read as a flow in which Vietnamese seafood majors have stepped into capital investment worked backward from the Japanese sales floor.

2. It becomes material for price negotiations under a weak yen

Full automation of sorting and shelling lowers processing costs' reliance on labor and, for shipments to Japan where dollar-denominated price increases are hard to pass on under a weak yen, room to hold prices creates it. From the buyer side, adding 'whether it is produced on the new plant's automated line' as an item of spec confirmation lets you secure both quality stability and a basis for cost at once. Just as the lifting of the ban on Indonesian seafood plants' exports to China is shifting the region's supply-demand map (638 Indonesian plants cleared for China: how will Vietnamese shrimp sourcing change), the more material you have for comparing suppliers, the more advantageous.

3. Beware constraints on the raw-material side and the ramp-up

There are also points to note. Employment of 5,000 and processing of 35,000 tonnes are both planned figures, and it typically takes time to reach full operation. Moreover, even if processing capacity grows, it becomes a pie in the sky unless the supply of farmed shrimp as raw material keeps up. In Vietnam, a move to reinforce the raw-material side through high-density, multi-stage farming is advancing (A former fisherman earns 12 billion dong a year: three-stage shrimp farming on the Thanh Hoa coast), and it will be necessary to verify in the second-half 2026 shipment results whether both wheels of processing and farming come together.

Ripple — Vietnamese seafood enters a phase of 'winning on equipment'

The Ca Mau plant is not a one-off investment but a signal that Vietnam's seafood industry as a whole is steering from labor-intensive toward equipment-intensive. If Vietnamese players, with their tariff advantage under the CPTPP and their accumulated processing technology, advance automation investment, the division of labor with India and Ecuador (raw material for the emerging players, processed products for Vietnam) will become even more fixed. For Japanese buyers, it means that while Vietnam's position as a procurement source for processed shrimp strengthens over the medium term, the basis for pricing processing fees is shifting from labor cost to equipment utilization rate.

Practical information — checkpoints when considering procurement

Summary — play the 'new plant card' in autumn-winter negotiations

Minh Phu's new Ca Mau plant is an investment that raises both the spare supply capacity and the price stability of processed shrimp for Japan at once. If Japanese food buyers are to move now, here are three things. First, confirm with the trading companies and importers you deal with the production allocation of the new plant's line and the plan for shipments to Japan. Second, in the autumn-winter 2026 price and volume negotiations ahead of year-end demand, use the new plant's start-up as material for securing volume and holding prices. Third, make the most of the automated line's flexibility and sound out early on small-lot custom inquiries such as nobashi specs and breading specifications. The king of shrimp looked at the Japanese sales floor and built a plant — there is no reason for the procurement side not to put this fact on the negotiating table too.

Sources

• VASEP: New VND1.5 trillion seafood processing plant inaugurated in Ca Mau
• Tuoi Tre News: $57mn seafood plant opens in Vietnam’s Ca Mau
• VASEP: Vietnam’s shrimp exports to Japan
• Mitsui & Co.: Investment participation in the Vietnamese shrimp production and processing company Minh Phu (2019)
• VIETJO: Mitsui & Co. acquires a 35.1% stake in Minh Phu Seafood, the world's largest shrimp exporter