“DISRUPTION is perceived as supportive for carriers, but not all disruptions are created equal,” said Simon Heaney, senior manager at Drewry Container Research, during a presentation on the Strait of Hormuz crisis on Wednesday.

“This is totally different than Covid. In the Covid period, severe supply constraints coincided with a surge in demand. The current conflict carries a meaningful downside risk to demand.”

That downside risk was highlighted in the International Monetary Fund’s new World Economic Outlook, released this week.

Before the Middle East war, the IMF had expected 3.4% global GDP growth this year, flat versus 2025. Its new reference case lowers that to 3.1%.

This reference scenario is already going stale. It assumes a “short-lived conflict” and energy prices normalising in the second half.

“With every day that passes where we don’t have a resolution, where the flow of oil and gas is limited through the Strait of Hormuz, we’re moving away from that scenario,” admitted IMF research director Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas during a press conference on Tuesday.

The reference scenario assumes an average crude price of $80 per barrel for full-year 2026. The IMF also presented an “adverse scenario” based on a higher average oil price, in which 2026 GDP growth slumps to 2.5%.

“We are now somewhere between the reference case and the adverse scenario, and every day we are drifting closer to the adverse scenario,” said Gourinchas.

The IMF outlined yet another possibility, a “severe scenario” in which energy disruptions extend into next year and there is greater macro instability.

This scenario puts 2026 GDP growth at just 2% — flirting with a global recession, defined as growth under 2%.

Heaney outlined how economic fallout could translate into lost container shipping demand.

At the beginning of this year, Drewry projected global port throughput growth (including loaded boxes, empties and transhipment) of 2.2%. It pared this to 1.8% in its latest forecast.

That is already a major drop: throughput growth was 6.2% in 2025.

Drewry believes this year’s throughput growth could sink much further — to 0.5% to 1.3% — if the strait remains closed.

“That would be quite a big downturn, but for now, volumes have not collapsed,” said Heaney. “Trade flows have bent rather than broken.”

Impacts to effective supply

The demand side is the main difference with Covid, but there is also a disparity on the vessel supply side.

The pandemic heavily disrupted liner operations, squeezing effective capacity. While there are supply inefficiencies this time around, they are far less severe. There is also a steady flow of newbuilds hitting the water, which was not the case in 2020-2022.

The strait closure has caused a massive disruption to the Middle East Gulf container trade, but the effect is largely localised to that region and western India. The Middle East represented only 4.7% of global container port throughput in 2025, according to Drewry.

The main effect for global trades stems from a 60%-80% rise bunker prices, leading to reduced vessel speed and surcharges passed along to shippers.

“Carriers will rely on operational measures such as slow steaming across the entire global network. This obviously has the knock-on effect of reducing effective capacity available to all trades,” said Heaney.

A more severe vessel supply disruption could emerge if the strait closure dragged on and there were bunker shortages.

“The risk of bunker shortages is very real, but it’s not an immediate one,” said Heaney. At present, there are still inventories to draw down.

“Widespread vessel layups due to fuel shortages represents a late-stage outcome.”

Potential for lasting changes

The Strait of Hormuz crisis could spur permanent changes to liner shipping regardless of how long it lasts.

“If the Middle East conflict stabilises and Hormuz reopens within our base-case timeline, it will have already exposed structural vulnerabilities that exist in shipping, which could potentially lead to more lasting changes, not just temporary disruptions,” Heaney explained.

“The attacks on shipping by the Houthi rebels have already started the process of shifting networks from being cost-optimised to being more risk-managed and resilience-focused,” he said.

Prior to the war with Iran, Drewry had expected Suez transits to gradually return to normal by this time next year. “We now believe Red Sea diversions will continue for the foreseeable future, with knock-on consequences for effective capacity,” said Heaney.

“This might become a permanent feature of the industry in the future, whereby shipping lines look to reduce their dependency on any single corridor.

“More diverse routings, especially if combined with slower steaming, would increase demand for ships and reshape newbuild and demolition strategies for shipowners.

“You could argue that carriers and shipowners have already been preparing for a sort of geopolitical perma-disruption by the fact that they’ve been ordering a record number of containerships over the past few years,” said Heaney.