Record transit and freight costs are no longer an anomaly the shipping industry can wait out, according to Orkhan Rustamov, chief executive of commodity trading house Alkagesta, in an exclusive opinion piece published by The Motorship.
Rustamov points to a cluster of price records broken for the first time since Argus began tracking key shipping prices in 2005: fees of up to US$2.5 million to transit both locks of the Panama Canal, Black Sea tanker freight rates, and the cost of moving oil from the Gulf to the Far East. Drought across Europe has pushed Trans-Rhine freight costs to their highest level in 14 years.
The temptation, he writes, is to blame events — the on-off conflict around Hormuz, continued uncertainty over one of the world's most vital trade routes, and the sharper impacts of a worsening climate. Those headwinds are real, but treating them as a fait accompli would, in his view, be a fatal mistake. Neither factor is going away, and persistently rising prices invite scrutiny and intervention from governments and international bodies while eroding the industry's standing as custodian of essential resources.
Agility is the watchword Rustamov returns to. Shipping companies, he argues, should be embedded with traders to build a physical trading strategy that can adapt quickly to sudden events, instead of treating vessels, route choice and freight as separate line items in a narrow procurement plan. Diversity of supply sources, transport modes and routings should be a baseline requirement rather than a nice-to-have — and traders, with their networks, speed and global reach, are well placed to supply that flexibility.
The second plank of his argument is contingency planning done well before something breaks. Little about the supply chain can be assumed, he writes: refineries and ports can be out of action at short notice, and operators should already know whether road or pipeline alternatives are viable. The fallback does not have to be perfect or cheapest — it has to work.
Rustamov also warns that the industry has become too fixated on the live price. Media, brokers, suppliers and customers all react hardest to today's and tomorrow's market shifts, but 2026, like 2022, has been a wake-up call to invest time, money and resources in the wider supply chain picture. More than half a year into the Hormuz disruption, he argues, boardrooms at shipping companies and trading houses have had ample time to start building resilient, diversified supply networks and contingency plans.
The stakes he sets out are both commercial and reputational. Failure to act, Rustamov concludes, threatens the industry's position as custodian of the resources that power the global economy — while the work done now is what will keep prices from spiralling when the next shock lands.
Alkagesta is an international commodity trading company active in petroleum products, fertilizers, biofuels and steel, with physical supply and bunkering operations spanning more than 48 countries. The full opinion piece is published by The Motorship.
