For years, supply chain leaders have been told that disruption can be managed with better data, better visibility, and better forecasting. The events of the past week in the Strait of Hormuz suggest otherwise.
In recent days, Maersk has suspended new bookings on several Gulf corridors and announced emergency freight increases, while Hapag-Lloyd has suspended transits through the strait and imposed war-risk surcharges on cargo to and from the Upper Gulf. At the same time, aviation authorities and carriers have had to contend with temporary airspace closures across parts of the region.
That matters far beyond the Gulf. The Strait of Hormuz remains one of the most important arteries in the global economy. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, about 20 million barrels per day of oil — roughly a quarter of global seaborne oil trade — pass through the waterway, with around 80 percent destined for Asian markets. The same corridor is also critical for LNG flows, especially from Qatar and the UAE.
A Chokepoint the Market Cannot Diversify Away
The immediate impact is easy to see: rerouted vessels, disrupted schedules, tighter equipment availability, higher insurance costs, and new surcharges layered onto already fragile transport economics. But the larger point is more uncomfortable. What this crisis exposes is not simply the vulnerability of one shipping lane. It is the persistence of a structural dependency that companies cannot engineer away.
The supply chain industry has spent the years since the pandemic talking about resilience. Diversify suppliers. Increase visibility. Build scenario planning into the operating model. All of that remains sensible. None of it changes the fact that global trade still runs through a small number of narrow, exposed corridors. When one of them becomes unstable, resilience turns out to be a relative term.
That is especially true now because the Hormuz disruption is not arriving in a calm system. Container shipping is already operating in a world shaped by Red Sea insecurity, volatile trade policy, and recurring freight-rate instability. Lloyd’s List reported this week that carriers were already rethinking Red Sea exposure even as the Hormuz situation worsened, creating the kind of overlapping pressure that supply chains absorb poorly and markets price quickly.
The Real Lesson for Supply Chain Executives
The language of digital control has encouraged an illusion: that modern supply chains are governed primarily by software. They are not. They are governed, in the end, by geography, infrastructure, and political risk.
That is why this episode deserves to be read as more than another headline about the Middle East. It is a reminder that many companies remain much better at mapping suppliers than at mapping corridor exposure. They know who makes the product. They are less certain about which maritime gateways, air corridors, and regional hubs their business truly depends on.
That blind spot now looks expensive. When carriers suspend bookings, war-risk surcharges appear overnight, and airspace restrictions begin to ripple through adjacent transport modes, the issue is no longer operational inconvenience. It becomes a question of how much optionality a supply chain really has — and how much of its resilience strategy was built on assumptions that only hold in peacetime.
Globalisation Still Runs Through Narrow Gates
There is a broader economic point here as well. Policymakers and executives alike often speak as though globalisation had evolved beyond physical bottlenecks. It has not. It still depends on a handful of maritime chokepoints whose stability no private company can guarantee.
The Strait of Hormuz is only the latest and most dramatic example. But it is clarifying because it strips away the managerial language and reveals the harder truth underneath: supply chains may be digitised, but they are still hostage to narrow waterways, military conflict, and state power.
That is not a failure of planning. It is a condition of the global trading system itself.
1 comment
Kai, this is a refreshing take on the ‘illusion of control.’ You’re absolutely right that software often masks the underlying geographic vulnerabilities we’ve spent decades trying to ignore.
While the industry focuses on ‘visibility,’ visibility alone doesn’t move a ship through a closed chokepoint. I’ve been looking into the specific mechanics of how this ‘Hormuz Standstill’ is creating a vessel deficit that will likely trigger a secondary wave of congestion at destination ports, even those far removed from the Gulf. We are witnessing a total collapse of the ‘Just-in-Time’ logic in real time.
Your point about mapping ‘corridor exposure’ instead of just ‘suppliers’ is the exact pivot leaders need to make right now. Thanks for the sharp analysis!