New Year, New Start

I sincerely hope all of you had a great holiday season!  I don't believe Mayan's calendar, so I still did a new year resolution for myself.  My goals are: graduate from MBA; obtain CPA certificate; get a job that I desire; have a vacation somewhere; learn a new music instrument, and sell one million pounds of lobsters.  I don't have a crystal ball, so I don't know what's going to happen in 2012 in the world, but I do know in my little big international trading world, it's off to a good start.

Right after Western's Christmas and New Year, we welcome Chinese Spring Festival. It's supposed to be the year of Dragon.  Lobster literally translated into Chinese is "dragon shrimp".  "Dragon" in Chinese culture is a symbol for power and excellence, valiance and boldness, heroism and perseverance, nobility and divinity. This pretty much explains itself why lobsters ("dragon shrimp") becomes the No. 1 choice on people's dinning table this year.  For the first week of Jan., I've get 20,000 lbs of orders.  We have run out of lobsters, but customers are still bombing my phones and emails. It looks like my one million goal is not too unreachable. 

The sad thing is this year Maine's lobster is terrible as far as the quality concerns.  The weather can't make up its mind to be cold or hot.  People are getting sick, so does lobster.  They are still soft and the shell never turns hard.  Unfortunately, this grade of lobsters are not suitable for far east shipment.  In the end of the day, Chinese people's appetite really is booming Canadian's fishing industry.  I wish I could do something for our lobster industry here, but other than buying a few from the local seafood market, there's not much I can do.  The frozen market is growing, however, all the processing plants closed down for the winter.  There got to be a better way operating our fishing industry here in Maine I think, and hope.