Our debt continues to decline as we judiciously use our surplus cash flows to deleverage our balance sheet.
We understand that the promotional activities by retail and food service companies in USA are being carried out albeit gradually to reduce the high-cost inventory that they were carrying from the past.
Hopefully, the consumption also would be improving during that time for the holiday sales considering that most of the lower-priced products are available at the disposal for the consumer base.
I have just explained mainly focusing on markets outside USA and focusing more on the Europe and UK market as well. This strategic move will not only diversify our revenue stream, but also enhance our resilience in the face of the market fluctuations.
We have been working on expanding our RTE capacities by 5,000 metric tons. The impact of that, of course, is more to be effective from Q2 onwards.
So, the RTE products are mainly taken by the retail markets or supermarkets, and it is less by restaurant chains or food service markets. And with that, we are actually working with some of the retail markets very carefully to ensure that, we lock-in the RTE products for the sizes which we have available in our supply market and we are confident of using them.
The market has been there all the time. It is our existing customers, who are currently sourcing those products from some other countries, some of the nations as Vietnam or or some extent from Bangladesh, for example, they have been doing that. And they were looking forward for our products like they already buy ready-to-cook products from our company, and they also wanted to add the RTE products also from us, because they know that, we have the certification processes, and we have a consistent relationship which we have built with them. Unfortunately, because of the pending regulatory approval process, which was like hanging in the air between the two governments India and EU commission that got stalled. And both the customer as well as the various customers in the EU as well as our company were eagerly waiting for this to get over so that we could also get these products because currently, we are already delivering to all the retail supermarket requirements.
If we look at the trend of last couple of years, we did see that in US, we faced extensive high competition from Ecuador. The thing is Ecuador is supplying and they have increased their production to beyond 1 million metric tons of raw material, which is I think they're almost looking at 1.2 to 1.5 million metric tons this year. At the same time, we did expect that once China opens up, Ecuador will be looking to go back to China and we would be looking at, we will be having more space in the US. But the way things are currently, the focus is now less of how we are going to beat each other on a competition basis, but the focus is more of promoting and increasing the consumption of the shrimp for which in the recent past there have been discussions happening of a global marketing effort between the countries of Ecuador and India and other Asian countries too.
Earlier the pricing was quite high, at least until last year. Now with all this new supply coming in and pricing also softening, there are discussions to actually put a joint marketing effort to overall increase the shrimp consumption.
And given the scenario, the biggest affected party in the whole supply chain in the current market trend is the primary producer, the farmer. Definitely, the primary producer is the one who has been at least having the most part of the margin in the entire supply chain. And their margins would get affected definitely.
And they are also rationalizing their costs and bringing down the way they are changing their strategies, which we did explain in the earlier concalls too, that as the market demands each of us, whether we as a processor and exporter or whether it is the primary producer..
Already some of the farmers, our primary producers have already moved to automatic feeders and all that, and which is, by the way, very dominant in countries like Ecuador. India also has been moving, but quite slow in that direction with regard to automation and reducing dependence on manpower.
But major importing markets for Shrimp products will be USA and China followed by EU. These will be the major ones and rest all of them for volumes wouldn't be a significant market as such, but still we are focusing to diversify.
In the present case, we are all aware is that Ecuador has been increasing its production and whereas our production kind have got stagnated or rather quite saturated at a certain point. So the question of increasing our market share doesn't really take place.