BOTH the Red Sea and Hormuz crises have caused serious disruption to container shipping, but the impact of the latter remains 'highly localised,' according to a Sea-Intelligence report.
The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has mostly disrupted operations of nearest transshipment hubs outside of the affected area and “not yet manifested as a global event,” the consultancy argued.
It cited the absence of “severe” delay spike, near-total evaporation of vessel arrivals and rampant service cancellations.
Following Iran’s effective blockade of Hormuz since late February, carriers “overwhelmingly chose to abandon the blocked network entirely, rather than trapping capacity in holding patterns,” Sea-Intelligence said.
Ships from Europe were then “forced” to discharge their Middle East‑bound “pipeline cargo” at the nearest hubs capable of absorbing the volume –– West Coast India and Colombo in Sri Lanka, the report added.
“As a result, the regular Europe-Indian Subcontinent service strings absorbed the brunt of this collateral damage,” with the trade lane’s schedule reliability plummeting by 20.3 percentage points, Sea-Intelligence said.
Meanwhile, Asian ships had alternate ports earlier in their routes as a buffer, which enabled them to arrive with normal loads and depart on schedule without running into the European-induced gridlock.
“The bottleneck was entirely landside,” it said.
Since vessel arrivals at the Indian Subcontinent hubs didn’t substantially increase, there was “no massive queue” of ships anchored offshore, making this as a localised yard density crisis rather than traditional berth congestion, according to the report.
In contrast, the Red Sea crisis created a “measurable drag” on global shipping, where diversions of vessels around the Cape of Good Hope led to open ocean delays, it said.
To isolate the true impact of each event from seasonal fluctuations, the consultancy used a pre-pandemic baseline from 2012-2019 and measured performance from the last "clean" month before each crisis to the first full month operating under the new constraints — November 2023 to January 2024 for the Red Sea, and February to March 2026 for Hormuz.
Regardless, data suggests that severing major maritime chokepoints would cause "a structural collapse of schedule reliability" on both land and water, the report noted.
