It did not take a naval blockade. It did not require underwater mines or a fleet of warships.
All it took was a handful of drone strikes in the vicinity of a 34-kilometre-wide waterway — and one of the most important shipping corridors in the world ground to a near-complete halt.
Since Iranian forces issued warnings prohibiting vessel passage through the Strait of Hormuz on 28 February 2026, tanker traffic has dropped to essentially zero. More than 150 vessels, including oil tankers and LNG carriers, are anchored outside the strait, waiting.
The world’s largest container shipping companies — Maersk, MSC, CMA CGM, Hapag-Lloyd, COSCO — have all suspended transits and rerouted their fleets.
Insurance cover for ships attempting the passage was withdrawn by 5 March, making the economic case for transit impossible even for operators willing to take the risk.
For logistics managers, freight buyers, and supply chain professionals, this is not a geopolitical story to follow from a distance.
It is an operational crisis that is already reshaping shipping routes, extending lead times, and inflating freight costs — and its full effects on global supply chains have barely begun to land.
What the Strait of Hormuz Actually Carries
To grasp the scale of disruption, it helps to understand exactly what passes through this narrow waterway on a normal day. The Strait of Hormuz is the only maritime exit from the Persian Gulf, flanked by Iran to the north and Oman to the south at its narrowest point.
In 2023, approximately 20.9 million barrels of oil per day flowed through the strait — around 20% of global petroleum liquids consumption.
In 2024, an estimated 84% of crude oil and condensate shipments through the waterway were destined for Asian markets, with Japan, China, South Korea, and India among the most heavily exposed importers. Europe, meanwhile, sources between 12% and 14% of its LNG from Qatar, with all of it shipped via Hormuz.
But energy is not the only thing at stake. The strait is also a critical artery for commodities including aluminium, sugar, and fertilizer.
Disruption here does not just push up fuel prices — it reverberates through food supply chains, manufacturing inputs, and consumer goods with a reach that extends far beyond energy markets.
Strait Alert
A strait does not need to be physically blocked to be effectively closed.
Rising insurance premiums, drone attacks, and crew safety concerns
have achieved what a naval blockade could not.
The Reroute: Cape of Good Hope and What It Costs
With both the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea route through the Suez Canal now effectively unavailable — Houthi forces in Yemen resumed attacks on commercial shipping on 28 February, closing the Bab el-Mandeb Strait as well — vessels heading from the Persian Gulf to Europe or North America face only one viable alternative: sailing around the southern tip of Africa via the Cape of Good Hope.
This is not a minor detour. Rerouting around the Cape adds 10 to 14 days to journey times for vessels on Middle East-to-Europe and Middle East-to-US East Coast routes.
Maersk has confirmed that all sailings on its Middle East-India to Mediterranean and Middle East-India to US East Coast services are now rerouting around Africa. CMA CGM and Hapag-Lloyd have issued identical advisories.
The time cost translates directly into capacity cost. When vessels spend additional weeks at sea, they are unavailable to make return voyages.
The effective carrying capacity of the global fleet shrinks even though the number of ships has not changed.
This is the same dynamic that drove container freight rates to record levels during the pandemic — and again during the 2024 Red Sea crisis — and it is already applying pressure to spot rates on affected trade lanes.
For shippers with cargo moving between Asia and Europe, or between the Middle East and any destination outside the Gulf region, the practical consequences are already materialising. Lead times that were already under pressure are stretching.
Delivery windows that were quoted weeks ago are no longer reliable. Inventory buffers that seemed adequate are being consumed faster than replenishment can occur.
The Insurance Problem That Changed Everything
What makes this crisis structurally different from many previous Hormuz scares is how it was achieved — and what that means for its resolution.
Iran did not physically seal the strait with a naval force. Instead, it targeted vessels selectively with drones and missiles, creating a threat environment that made the waterway commercially untenable without a single sustained military engagement.
By 5 March, protection and indemnity insurance — the essential cover that ship owners need to operate commercially — had been withdrawn for vessels transiting the strait, effectively making it economically impossible to attempt the passage even for operators willing to accept physical risk.
When the insurance market closes a door, the shipping industry cannot walk through it regardless of what governments say or offer.
The US government announced that the Navy would escort tankers through the strait and that the US Development Finance Corporation would provide political risk insurance to shipping lines operating in the Gulf.
In practice, traffic has remained at near zero. As BIMCO’s chief safety and security officer Jakob Larsen noted, providing naval protection for all tankers operating in threatened waters is unrealistic — it would require a very high number of warships and military assets that cannot be concentrated in one narrow waterway indefinitely.
The deeper problem is one of confidence. As analysts observing the 2024 Red Sea crisis demonstrated, even after Operation Prosperity Guardian sought to reassure commercial operators, most continued to reroute rather than return.
Markets and operators require sustained proof of safety — not a government assurance — before normalising behaviour. The same pattern is now repeating in the Hormuz context, and it suggests that even a ceasefire or diplomatic resolution may not immediately restore full shipping traffic.
Which Trade Routes and Industries Are Most Exposed
Not all supply chains are equally affected, and logistics teams should assess their specific exposure rather than assuming uniform impact.
Energy and petrochemicals are the most immediately disrupted. Iraq has already been forced to shut down production at some of its largest oil fields because it has nowhere to store or export crude that cannot move through Hormuz.
Qatar’s force majeure declaration on LNG exports has removed a significant share of global gas supply from the market.
Refiners in Japan — which sources roughly 95% of its crude from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the UAE, and Qatar — have asked their government to release strategic stockpiles to maintain operations.
South and Southeast Asia face the sharpest LNG exposure. Qatar and the UAE together account for 99% of Pakistan’s LNG imports and 72% of Bangladesh’s.
With limited storage capacity and constrained procurement flexibility, both countries face the risk of power-sector demand destruction rather than simply higher prices.
India faces what one analyst described as a dual physical and financial shock — more than half its LNG imports are Gulf-linked, and a significant share is Brent-indexed, meaning a crude price surge simultaneously raises oil import costs and LNG contract prices.
For manufacturers and retailers importing goods from the Gulf region or routing via the Red Sea, the compounding closure of both Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb creates a situation with no short routing alternative.
Every cargo that was moving through either waterway is now adding weeks to its journey, which translates directly into missed delivery windows and inventory shortfalls downstream.
Global Shipping Alert
When both the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea are blocked,
no short alternative route exists. Each affected cargo adds
10–14 days — and the global fleet shrinks accordingly.
What Logistics Teams Should Be Doing Right Now
The immediate priority for any logistics operation with exposure to Gulf-origin or Gulf-transiting cargo is visibility — knowing exactly where your shipments are, what route they are currently on, and what the revised estimated arrival date looks like under Cape of Good Hope rerouting.
Contact your freight forwarder or carrier today if you have not already done so. Hapag-Lloyd has advised customers with cargo in transit or planned shipments to the region to contact their local representatives for shipment-specific guidance.
The situation is fluid, and carriers are managing significant operational complexity — early communication gives you the best chance of securing priority handling and timely updates.
Review your inventory positions for any product category that originates in or transits through the Gulf.
If you have safety stock thresholds, stress-test them against a 14-day additional lead time. For categories where you are running lean, assess whether emergency procurement from alternative sources is feasible, even at a premium — the cost of stockouts in critical categories may well exceed the premium on alternative supply.
Examine your contracts for force majeure clauses. As Hill Dickinson’s legal analysis notes, the rerouting around the Cape of Good Hope is being treated by carriers as a safety-justified deviation.
Under standard charterparty terms, an unreasonable deviation can deprive a carrier of contractual defences and jeopardise insurance cover.
Logistics buyers should understand whether their contracts provide any protection or indemnity in this scenario, and whether force majeure clauses are being invoked by carriers in ways that affect their obligations.
For cargo not yet booked, factor current conditions into your freight budget immediately. Spot container rates on affected trade lanes are already moving upward.
The longer the disruption persists, the more effective fleet capacity is consumed by longer voyages, and the higher rates are likely to climb. Securing space now, even at elevated rates, may prove cheaper than booking in six weeks.
The Longer View: Choke Points Are Not Going Away
The Hormuz crisis of 2026 is the third major maritime chokepoint disruption in three years, following the 2024 Red Sea crisis and the compounding pressures of post-COVID port congestion before that.
Each event has exposed the same structural reality: global supply chains are built for efficiency, not resilience, and they have very little slack when a single choke point closes.
The geographic concentration of energy exports through a handful of narrow waterways — Hormuz, Bab el-Mandeb, the Suez Canal — means that geopolitical disruption in one relatively small area can propagate through supply chains worldwide.
As one analyst put it, targeting these chokepoints is the strategic weaponisation of trade itself: you do not need to win a war to cause enormous economic damage; you only need to make a waterway feel unsafe.
For logistics professionals, the lesson is the same one that the pandemic, the Suez blockage, and the Red Sea crisis each taught — and that the industry has been slow to fully absorb.
Supply chain resilience requires geographic diversity in sourcing, genuine inventory buffers rather than theoretical ones, and contractual flexibility that accounts for the real possibility of major routing disruptions.
The Hormuz crisis is not a once-in-a-generation event. It is the new baseline against which supply chain planning needs to be measured.
The Bottom Line
The Strait of Hormuz crisis has already added 10 to 14 days to transit times on major trade routes, removed effective capacity from the global container fleet, spiked freight rates on affected lanes, and disrupted the energy supply chains that underpin almost every other form of economic activity.
The situation is evolving daily, and no one can say with certainty when the strait will reopen to normal commercial traffic or whether a diplomatic resolution is near.
What is certain is that the supply chain consequences are compounding with every passing day that the disruption continues — and that logistics teams who act on current information now are in a materially better position than those who wait for clarity that may not come quickly.
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