🎯 Why American Samoa — The Short Version
This is, honestly, close to a company town in island form. A single StarKist Samoa cannery — owned by South Korea's Dongwon Industries — generates roughly 80% of the territory's export revenue and stands as the largest private employer, second only to the local government itself. Everything about American Samoa's business reality flows from that one fact: the tuna cannery's health is the territory's economic health.
The upside case for American Samoa isn't diversified private enterprise — it's the territory's unusual legal status. As unincorporated U.S. territory, American Samoa exports canned tuna to the U.S. mainland duty-free, while competitors in Thailand and Ecuador pay roughly 9% tariffs. That single trade advantage is the entire reason the cannery is still here after competitors fled to lower-wage countries decades ago.
🚀 Starting a Business — The One Rule That Changes Everything
Company formation itself follows standard U.S. territorial procedure — registering with the American Samoa Government's Development Bank / Department of Commerce, obtaining a federal EIN, and complying with the same general commercial code framework you'd expect on U.S. soil. That part is unremarkable.
What isn't unremarkable: roughly 90% of land in American Samoa is held under Fa'a Samoa communal land tenure, constitutionally protected and, in practice, not available for sale to non-Samoans. Outside investors lease rather than own, and land deals routinely require navigating village-level (matai) authority alongside territorial government approval. Any realistic business plan here starts with a land and community-relations strategy, not a term sheet.
Also worth knowing: American Samoans are U.S. Nationals, not U.S. citizens by birth — a distinction that shapes local politics and identity, though it has limited direct effect on standard commercial registration for an incoming business.
🐟 The StarKist Economy — And Its New Bet
StarKist Samoa's Pago Pago plant processes roughly 400–450 metric tons of tuna a day, running close to 2,000 workers at peak season (many recruited from neighboring independent Samoa, housed in company-built facilities). The industry as a whole — cannery plus supporting fishing fleet — supports an estimated 4,500-5,000 jobs on an island of under 50,000 people. It is also chronically fragile: cannery employment has fallen by nearly half since the mid-2000s as competitors closed (Chicken of the Sea in 2010, Tri Marine's Samoa Tuna Processors in 2016), squeezed by minimum-wage increases, fuel costs, and a proposed federal marine sanctuary that fishing interests warn could cut off the fleet's own fishing grounds.
Facing that fragility, StarKist has started actively diversifying the plant itself — adding a pet-food production line in 2025 using tuna byproduct. More striking: a 2026 development push (backed by the American Samoa Economic Development Council) is pitching the territory's existing industrial workforce and infrastructure for an entirely new industry — critical mineral processing from seabed nodules in the nearby Clarion-Clipperton Zone and American Samoa's own exclusive economic zone. It's speculative and early, but it's the first serious attempt in decades to build a second pillar under the local economy.
🏢 Who Actually Runs the Economy
There is no local stock exchange — American Samoa uses the same U.S. federal securities framework and mainland exchanges (NYSE, Nasdaq) as any state, so there's nothing regional to analyze there. The real concentration of economic power sits in two places: the American Samoa Government itself (the single largest employer on the island by a wide margin) and StarKist Samoa / Dongwon Industries, the South Korean seafood conglomerate that has owned the cannery since 2008. Beyond those two, the private economy is overwhelmingly small-scale: family-run retail, construction, and the fishing fleet that supplies the cannery.
✍️ The Kaufmann Bottom Line
There's no polite way to say this: American Samoa's economy is one company and one tariff advantage away from a much harder conversation. That's not a reason to dismiss it — it's a reason to be honest about what "doing business" here actually means. This isn't a market to enter for diversified private enterprise; it's a single-employer island economy where land can't be bought, only leased through community relationships, and where the entire trade logic rests on the territory's unusual status as U.S. soil south of the equator.
The seabed-minerals push is the first genuinely new idea in a generation, and worth watching — but it's a bet on geology and politics, not yet a business. For now, StarKist's fortunes are American Samoa's fortunes, for better or worse.
—Radim Kaufmann, 2026
