In any war, there are beneficiaries and losers — and in the Gulf, some kept selling into the rally and banking the upside, while others watched crude cargoes stall and revenues collapse, splitting fortunes across the region.

The rule of the game was clear: access. Iran controls the Strait of Hormuz, while Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Oman have at least partial workarounds — pipelines and ports that route crude to the Red Sea or the Arabian Sea. Iraq, Kuwait, and Qatar don’t, so their exports effectively hit a wall. A Reuters analysis of export data shows how wide that divide is.

The numbers tell tales

Who captured the downside: Iraq and Kuwait saw notional export revenues drop by three-quarters y-o-y in March — with Iraq down 76% to USD 1.73 bn from USD 7.27 bn and Kuwait down 73% to USD 864 mn from USD 3.5 bn. Qatar followed, with revenues dropping to some USD 554 mn from roughly USD 1.7 bn a year earlier. The UAE sits in the middle, with revenues down 2.6% to USD 6.58 bn from USD 6.76 bn.

Who captured the upside: Iran’s revenues rose by about 37% to some USD 5.7 bn, Oman’s climbed 26% to USD 2.9 bn, and Saudi Arabia edged up 4.3% to USD 13.55 bn — despite lower volumes.

Everyone exported less y-o-y, but the scale of the drop is telling. Iraq’s exports collapsed to just 17.4 mn barrels in March this year from 101.7 mn last year, while Kuwait fell to 8.7 mn from 45.5 mn, and Qatar to 5.6 mn from 23.8 mn. Saudi Arabia’s exports dropped to 136 mn from 181.7 mn. Meanwhile, the UAE held up with 66 mn bbl from 94.5 mn, Oman with 29.1 mn from 32.3 mn, and Iran with 57.4 mn from 60.2 mn.

What the numbers mean

An access shock: “What looked like a temporary spike in prices and freight has revealed a deeper divide between states that can reach the world through several doors and those whose fortunes depend on one locked gate,” Wolfgang Lehmacher, former head of supply chain and transport industries at the World Economic Forum, tells EnterpriseAM.

Saudi Arabia played it like a system manager: While exports dropped 26% y-o-y to 4.39 mn bbl / d in March, higher prices added some USD 558 mn in value. The Kingdom had already front-loaded exports in February — its highest since April 2023 — anticipating disruption. The result: lower volumes, higher revenues, and continuity with buyers when others went dark.

The UAE shows the limits of resilience: The Habshan-Fujairah pipeline, with a capacity of 1.5-1.8 mn bbl / d, allowed some bypass, thus cushioning the blow. But attacks on Fujairah still disrupted loadings, and revenues fell by more than USD 174 mn y-o-y. The route existed, but the reliability didn’t fully hold.

Oman and Iran captured the clearest upside: With Iranian-linked cargoes among the few transiting the tightly controlled strait, and Omani ports maintaining open routes to the Arabian Sea, both were able to keep exports flowing.

Iraq and Kuwait were hit by access: March revenues were partially supported by cargoes that slipped out early in the conflict, but both countries face steeper declines in April as those early shipments roll off. However, Iraq may get a breather from the exemption to pass Hormuz and overland crude trucking.

Why this matters

A repricing of optionality: “Producers whose exports rely on a single chokepoint can lose most of their external income overnight; those with alternative routes keep trading,” Lehmacher said. The market is starting to price that difference — pipelines, ports, and redundancy will be core valuation drivers.

It’s not about what’s underground anymore: “Resilience has long been measured by the wrong yardstick. Underground wealth and low production costs were treated as the main signs of strength, while the seaborne system was taken for granted. Hormuz has shown how fragile that assumption is,” Lehmacher noted.

For those with alternatives, the advantage is real: Bypass routes clearly don’t replace Hormuz, but they keep a meaningful share of exports moving. That’s enough to maintain revenues, reduce fiscal strain and — more importantly — stay reliable in the eyes of buyers when supply chains break. “Over time, that can be worth more than any temporary price premium. It can mean contracts that endure the next shock, joint investment in new infrastructure, and a central seat at the table when future corridors are drawn up,” Lehmacher told us.

For geography-constrained producers, it’s only damage control. The real decision comes after the crisis — whether to redesign or repeat. That could mean investing in overland routes, shared pipelines, and reworking contracts to make such routes bankable — as long-discussed alternatives may return on the table. They can treat this as an unlucky episode and hope it does not repeat, or they can treat it as a design brief,” Lehmacher explained.

What’s next?

Diversification is the key: “Major importers now know that their energy lifeline can be cut by events far from home. That knowledge will drive diversification: more suppliers in more regions, more storage closer to demand, and contracts that build in alternatives when a route fails,” Lehmacher told us.

Our take: The beneficiaries won’t be those with the cheapest barrels — but those with options. We can expect logistics strategies to shift from a single “best route” — not only in energy, but in the whole trade industry — to a portfolio of corridors that can absorb shocks when one fails.

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