The regional war is disrupting trade and logistics — but just how severe are the repercussions? With the closure of key maritime chokepoints and a threat to the reliability of key Gulf hubs, we dive into the market impact and explore who bears the brunt and who capitalizes from losses.

Who pays when chokepoints fail — and who benefits from detours?

When the world’s two most important chokepoints are compromised, where do we go? The simultaneous threats to the Suez Canal and Strait of Hormuz have created a strategic chokehold for global trade, turning a bottleneck that escalates normal trade delays into widespread market disruption.

The math for a Suez-Hormuz bypass is catastrophic for margins. Rerouting Indian or Gulf exports around the Cape of Good Hope adds 15 to 20 days to transit times — but the bigger shock is the war-risk premium, which has jumped from 0.025% to 0.5% of vessel value in just a matter of days. With Brent crude surging to USD 130 per barrel on Hormuz closure fears, the delivered cost of goods is no longer predictable — exporters who paid USD 300 for a container to Dubai are now starting at USD 1.2k.

The detour around Africa is not all rainbows and butterflies — South African ports, such as Durban, Cape Town, and Coega, are not built to handle a 90% diversion of Suez traffic. Bunkering hubs like Algoa Bay are under strain from regulatory disputes and rising demand, forcing vessels to to wait in long queues just to fuel up for the North Atlantic leg.

Can inland transport or pipelines do the trick? Not quite. The Saudi East-West pipeline moves 5 mn barrels per day — far less than the 20 mn that normally pass through Hormuz. Overland corridors, like the International North-South Transport Corridor, don’t have the TEU capacity to handle diverted Suez traffic that the Cape of Good Hope can handle.

The damage will hit other industries as well — Tesla and Volvo paused production in Europe after components failed to arrive on time during the Red Sea disruption in 2024.

The beneficiaries on the carrier side are those with pricing power. Hapag-Lloyd is already layering a war risk surcharge on Persian Gulf cargo and has published fresh tariff increases from North Europe to India and the Middle East starting 1 April.

Freight rates could rebalance…eventually

The shipping industry may find itself insulated from a problem that was supposed to hurt it. Overcapacity in the market is “being hidden by disruptions, depressing freight rates,” Simon Heaney, container industry analyst at Drewry, told EnterpriseAM. “Excess supply growth has been curtailed due to things like slower steaming, port congestion, and obviously the Red Sea diversions creating longer journey times.”

A wind-down in disruptions would have caused a substantial drop in freight rates, and in turn carrier bottom lines. “The speed of our return back through the Suez Canal will impact the market’s ability to be shielded [from the level of overcapacity],” Heaney had told us.

This year was expected to usher in an ease in disrupting factors, with Red Sea diversions starting to scale back. Instead, that disruption has now extended to Hormuz.

Oil prices could be a drag, though. We know now that sustained disruptions could mean crude will hit the USD 100 mark. That would mean higher costs for shippers since fuel accounts for up to 40% of their expenses.

Could repeated disruptions erode confidence in Gulf hub ports?

No port in the wider corridor is fully insulated anymore, with strikes hitting major ports such as the UAE’s Jebel Ali in Dubai, Zayed Port in Abu Dhabi, the Port of Bahrain, and Oman’s Duqm with two tankers hit near Khasab Port and Sultan Qaboos Port.

Gulf hub confidence is on a short leash: The precautionary suspensions and vessel anchoring near Hormuz came on top of months of Red Sea volatility — starting in late 2023 — that already forced some carriers to reroute around the Cape to avoid Bab el Mandeb. Gulf hubs like Jebel Ali were used more heavily as consolidation and feeder redistribution nodes. Congestion at Jebel Ali hit four- to six-day vessel delays at the time vs the usual zero-day delays.

This week’s temporary shutdown marks a different layer of risk. Red Sea rerouting tested capacity, while now tensions test access.

The transshipment business isn’t a volume game, it’s a reliability game, and geopolitics is now the dominant variable in that equation. Shippers and carriers can tolerate congestion surcharges, delays, even premium rates — but what they can’t tolerate is unpredictability. Gulf hubs “dominated” because carriers could anchor the routing playbook around them with predictable turnaround times. But now, war-risk premiums and corridor volatility are reshaping routing decisions.

The same strategic geography that created the edge is now the liability. Proximity to the world’s busiest energy corridor built scale, but also (as we’ve seen) volatility, with the dual corridor exposure of the Red Sea and Hormuz

Who loses: The risk sits with ports whose volumes depend on passing cargo, not local demand — particularly Gulf transshipment hubs like the UAE’s Jebel Ali and Khalifa. Such ports will not only lose cargo, but also the routing network. When carriers reroute, they don’t simply swap one port for another, they redesign entire service strings, and those strings are sticky (as we’ve seen in the Red Sea) — they rarely reverse cleanly when security improves.

Who gains: Ports sitting outside Hormuz, offering geographic insulation, could gain. Oman’s Salalah, which handled 4.3 mn TEUs in 2025, provides scale. India’s Mundra and Sri Lanka’s Colombo provide established transshipment capability without direct exposure to the military geometry, according to a report (pdf). Djibouti remains strategically positioned near Bab el Mandeb, though its fortunes depend heavily on Red Sea security stabilizing. Ports slightly removed from the chokepoint gain appeal precisely because they sit one step outside the exposure zone.

Egypt sits in the middle — exposed on energy, opportunistic on containers: Operations in East Port Said on the Mediterranean remain steady, a senior Egyptian government source tells EnterpriseAM, arguing that the port’s container-heavy profile shields it from Hormuz-linked crude disruptions. The terminal continues to lean on transshipment volumes, which hit 5.6 mn TEUs in 2025. However, Ain Sokhna is already feeling the knock-on from halted oil tanker movements tied to Hormuz.

The upside — if it materializes — is diversion: As more vessels extend voyages around the Cape, Damietta and Alexandria could capture incremental container calls and logistics activity. But this isn’t a clean win. The real variable is duration: a short shock creates selective port gains, while a prolonged disruption erodes canal-linked revenue and tightens energy exposure.

Airline impact goes beyond cancellations — it hits shares too

The Gulf’s ‘super-connector’ model hit a wall of closed airspace — and the closure of some of the world’s busiest international hubs isn't just a disruption, it is a rapid shift of the world's air traffic and trade flows

The East-West bridge has buckled: With Jordan, Dubai, and Qatar airport hubs partially or fully shuttered, primary corridors for India-Europe and Asia-US traffic could potentially disappear. Oil prices jumped nearly 7%, but the real “war tax” is rerouting — Air India is now making mid-route stops in Rome for US-bound flights, a move that will cut the efficiency and cost-advantage of the ultra-long-haul model.

Who’s hit the hardest? Emirates and Qatar Airways were the worst-affectedcarriers — with the two airlines cancelling over 400 flights each. Global travel stocks reacted sharply — with TUI shares dropping 8.5%, Lufthansa down 6.5%, and IAG falling 4.8% as the market priced in a long-term curb on travel appetite. India’s IndiGo stood out as the hardest-hit non-regional airline — with Indian carriers particularly exposed due to their heavy reliance on Middle Eastern schedules for migrant worker traffic as well as existing bans on using Pakistani airspace, according to analysts.

The immediate reaction was severe — but the long-term impact could be more significant. Analysts warn that if the aviation hubs remain closed, we could be seeing a massive spike in air freight rates and a total realignment of aircraft positioning across the hemisphere. “We believe that an active war zone, along with the resulting flight disruptions –– due to closure of airspace and airports –– is likely to curb travel appetite in the region,” said B Riley Securities in a note.

Capacity is the only currency in crisis: King Khalid International in Riyadh has emerged as a principal evacuation hub for the wealthy and senior executives. Istanbul is the other big beneficiary — leveraging its 80% capacity share to absorb ultra-long-haul diversions while its secondary hub, Sabiha Gökçen, captures regional budget traffic via Pegasus Airlines.

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