In March 2026, the world’s three largest shipping companies simultaneously suspended their transit through the Strait of Hormuz. This decision illustrates how the fragmentation of global trade begins at physical chokepoints, before tariff negotiations or commercial policy decisions. When a strait closes, flows reorganize at a cost that redistributes competitive advantages for years to come.
Key Points
- In March 2026, Maersk and CMA CGM announced measures including rerouting via the Cape of Good Hope, while MSC ordered its vessels present or en route to the Gulf to seek shelter, extending Asia-Europe connections by ten to fourteen days.
- Volumes on the Asia-Europe route record significant growth, but with an import/export imbalance that has worsened significantly since 2024.
- A container capacity surplus is expected between 2026 and 2028; deliveries increase supply while detours absorb part of effective capacity.
- Gulf countries, South Asian and East African nations are the first exposed: their access to global supply chains is degrading faster than economies with alternative port infrastructure.
- The coming years will determine which alternative corridors are viable on a global scale and stable enough to justify permanent infrastructure investments.
A Strait Worth 20% of Global Oil and Billions of Boxes
Hormuz is the world’s most heavily traveled passageway in absolute terms. Approximately 20% of global oil supplies transit through it, according to the International Energy Agency. For containers, the strait is primarily the gateway for Gulf economies and a secondary corridor for part of the Asia-Europe freight passing through the Port of Jebel Ali in Dubai, a regional hub that concentrates transshipments to East Africa, the Indian subcontinent and Central Asia.
When the three shipping companies decide to suspend their passage in March 2026, they acknowledge a reality that their risk management teams have documented for months: the threat to commercial traffic in the Gulf is no longer theoretical. The 2024 Houthi attacks against ships in the Red Sea had already forced a first major rerouting. Hormuz crosses an additional threshold.
Maersk, CMA CGM and MSC together represent a significant share of global container shipping capacity. These three players made their decision separately, within the same windows of a few days, a sign that their risk analyses converged. Other operators aligned themselves accordingly. Rerouting via the Cape of Good Hope became the norm for the Asia-Europe route within weeks.
Ten Extra Days at Sea, and an Imbalance Taking Hold
The detour via the Cape extends rotations by ten to fourteen days depending on ports of origin and destination. This extension is not just another line on a freight invoice. It immobilizes ships, consumes additional fuel, and desynchronizes supply chains that operate on tight schedules. A factory that calibrated its production on supplies arriving at day 28 must reconfigure its flows when the delay extends to day 42.
The effect on volumes is counterintuitive at first glance. The Asia-Europe route records significantly high volumes. But this figure masks a structural reality that the import/export imbalance highlights. The import/export imbalance is worsening significantly. In other words, for each box leaving Asia for Europe, shipping companies reload a minority proportion of boxes in the return direction.
This imbalance is not new in maritime transport. Rerouting via the Cape modifies this dynamic. Empty containers accumulate in European ports, far from where loading demand exists. Repositioning them costs money and time. For European shippers wanting to export to Asia, this means additional delays and sporadic container availability.
Capacity Surplus Arrives at the Wrong Time
Between 2026 and 2028, a wave of new container ship deliveries will arrive on the market. Orders were placed in the logistics euphoria of 2021-2022, when freight rates reached levels incomparable to the pre-pandemic period. The timing was rational for each shipping company individually: margins justified the investment. The collective result is structural overcapacity arriving precisely when rerouting via the Cape immobilizes more ships on longer rotations.
The effect is paradoxical. Additional ships on longer routes can compensate for part of the capacity imbalance—more ships for the same volume, but over greater distances. Except the expected surplus exceeds this adjustment. Cheaper empty spaces to transport give shipping companies less incentive to optimize empty container repositioning, which can perpetuate the imbalance.
For shippers, the situation is schizophrenic. Freight rates on certain routes remain high due to geopolitical uncertainty and operational rerouting costs. On other routes, overcapacity weighs on prices. Navigating this environment requires logistical expertise that many mid-sized companies lack in-house, and this reinforces dependence on large freight forwarders who can arbitrate between routes and shipping companies.
Countries Not on the New Routes
Rerouting via the Cape is not geographically neutral. It favors certain port hubs and marginalizes others.
The major short-term winners are ports on the Cape route, notably Tanger Med in Morocco, which strengthens its role as an Atlantic-Mediterranean transshipment hub, and South African ports, Algoa Bay and Durban, whose traffic increases mechanically. Singapore maintains its role as an irreplaceable regional Asian hub: flows converge there regardless of which transoceanic route is chosen.
The losers are more discreet in the statistics but more vulnerable in fact. Gulf economies—Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman—see their direct connections with Asia and Europe complicated. Jebel Ali remains operational, but its attractiveness as a regional transshipment hub depends on the regularity of major shipping company calls. Fewer direct calls mean more transshipments, thus more delays and costs for shippers using these ports.
East Africa is in an even more fragile situation. Countries such as Ethiopia, Tanzania and Mozambique depend on secondary maritime links that themselves rely on hub calls in the region’s major ports. When the geography of main routes changes, secondary connections often deteriorate first. This phenomenon is less visible in global statistics; record figures on the Asia-Europe route mask it, but it is documented by the International Chamber of Shipping as a structural risk of marginalizing low-traffic economies.
Which Corridors Can Hold Until 2030
The suspension of Hormuz raises a structural question: which alternative corridors resist on a global scale and are stable enough to justify permanent infrastructure investments.
The Cape of Good Hope holds. It is a long route, expensive in fuel and rotation time, but geopolitically safe. No hostile actor controls a single point of passage on this route. The main risk is meteorological; seas around Cape Horn and the Cape can be severe, but shipping companies know how to manage this. For the Asia-Europe route, the Cape will likely remain a credible alternative as long as the geopolitical situation in the Gulf and Red Sea remains uncertain.
If the situation around Hormuz persists beyond 2027, part of Asia-Europe traffic could remain routed via the Cape for an extended period.
The Northern corridor, via the Arctic, is another avenue that Russia long marketed as a strategic alternative. Reality is more modest. The Northeast Passage remains seasonal, requires icebreakers or ice-strengthened hulls, and crosses waters subject to Russian jurisdiction, which, since 2022, is a political as much as logistical brake for most Western shipping companies. Lloyd’s List closely monitors Arctic traffic evolution: volumes remain marginal, and Western sanctions against Russia limit possibilities for investing in necessary port infrastructure.
The Transcaspian corridor, connecting Central Asia to Europe via the Caspian Sea, the Caucasus and the Black Sea, has attracted investments since 2022, notably from China as part of the New Silk Road and from the European Union seeking to diversify its land corridors. This corridor presents an advantage: it entirely bypasses Middle Eastern seas. Its major disadvantage is capacity. The volumes it can absorb remain far below those of maritime transport. For high-value-added, low-volume merchandise, it is competitive.
For standard containers, it cannot substitute for large-scale maritime routes before years of investment.
The question of port infrastructure is ultimately the most structuring horizon for 2030. Ports like Salalah in Oman or Djibouti were designed as regional hubs in a route geography that assumed free access to Hormuz and the Red Sea. If this geography stabilizes in its currently degraded configuration, these ports will need to adapt their positioning, or risk gradually finding themselves off the main routes. Port investment decisions made between 2026 and 2028 will be determining for the logistics map of the following decade.
Current Decisions by Shipping Companies
Faced with this uncertainty, the three major shipping companies are not passive. Maersk has accelerated its investment in land logistics—warehouses, road transport, customs clearance—to offer its customers end-to-end solutions that partially absorb maritime delay variability. The idea is to become less a box transporter than a supply chain manager, which changes the business model but reduces dependence on the vicissitudes of a single maritime route.
CMA CGM has continued its policy of acquiring port and logistics capacity. The Marseille-based group owns terminals in several major world ports, giving it flexibility to redirect flows faster than competitors. Owning the terminal also means controlling call priorities, a decisive advantage when routes reorganize.
MSC, which took the global capacity leadership in 2022, maintains a more traditional strategy centered on fleet optimization. The Geneva-based group has ordered a significant number of large container ships, giving it cost leverage on long rotations, exactly the format that the Cape detour imposes.
These strategies converge toward the same conclusion: global logistics is entering a phase where resilience costs more than pure optimization. Supply chains must integrate geopolitical risks and increased costs as long as disruptions persist. For companies shipping goods, this means structurally higher logistics costs and pressure to revisit the geography of their supplies, not just their transport providers.
The fragmentation of global trade indeed begins at physical chokepoints. What Hormuz reveals in 2026 is that modifications of maritime routes reconfigure flows with an extent that tariff or commercial adjustments alone cannot absorb. Decision-makers who thought of logistics as an adjustable variable of commercial policy will have to reconsider the order of factors.
Sources
- DocShipper, Maritime Freight Crisis 2026, Impact of the Strait of Hormuz: https://docshipper.fr/actualites/crise-fret-maritime-2026-impact-du-detroit-dormuz-explosion-des-couts/
- KPMG Logistics 2026, Report on Global Supply Chain Imbalances (cited via DocShipper)
- Drewry, Container Capacity Outlook 2026-2028 (sector report, no direct link available)
- International Chamber of Shipping, Risks of Logistics Marginalization for Low-Traffic Economies (ICS, no direct link available)
- S&P Global Platts, Analysis of Cape of Good Hope Rerouting, 2026-2027 Projections (S&P Global, no direct link available)
- Lloyd’s List, Tracking Arctic Traffic and Northern Corridor Constraints (Lloyd’s List, no direct link available)
- International Energy Agency, Hormuz’s Share of Global Oil Supplies: https://www.iea.org
