Brixham Trawler Agents celebrates first birthday of the KOSMOS auction system

June 4, 2019 was an historic day for Aucxis and Brixham Trawler Agents (BTA). The British fish auction was the first to introduce KOSMOS, our digital trading platform in the cloud.
In an interview with Barry Young – CEO at BTA – we asked him some questions about the situation after 1 year of online auctioning.

Aucxis: What was the main reason why BTA was ready to play a pioneering role in cloud auctioning?

BTA: The decision to end shout auctioning was made back in 2017. However, rather than investing in costly software and hardware to run an electronic clock auction through the internet, BTA wanted to invest in a game-changer on behalf of the whole fishing community. This is exactly what we found in Aucxis’ KOSMOS system.

Aucxis: How did the fishermen react to this decision?

BTA: In the past, the fishermen often asked us to offer their fish to a wider audience to get better prices. BTA believed that a system like KOSMOS would encourage a lot more fishermen to land their fish in its port, which would give the buyers a lot more opportunity to buy a lot more fish. Today we can indeed confirm that even more fishermen have found their way to land their products here in Brixham than before. 

Aucxis: Did the switch from a shout auction to a digital clock auction lead up to the attraction of more buyers as well?

BTA: It sure did. First of all, we attracted about 20 additional UK-based buyers. Moreover, before KOSMOS, we never had dealings with buyers from the European continent. Now we already have about 15 of them.

Aucxis: What about the effect of this new supply and demand balance on the price-making?

BTA: We can confirm that our prices are even better than during the shout auctioning era. Since the introduction of KOSMOS, they have increased by roughly 12%.

Needless to say that we are very glad we took the plunge to switch to the KOSMOS system. With what we know today about the power of KOSMOS, we would even have skipped the intermediary step of electronic registration using a tablet during the shout auction. KOSMOS has potentially put BTA years ahead of its competitors in becoming the leading fish market in England.

Obviously, Aucxis is very proud of these positive comments. In order to maintain – and even improve – this level, we continue to work on the integration of new functionalities at the request of the market. Thanks to the evolution contract, our customers always have the most recent KOSMOS version.