Industry News

The constantly evolving geopolitical situation shows that trade routes can change faster than operating systems.

Hormuz disruption has forced markets, shipowners and cargo interests to reconsider routes once treated as dependable. Red Sea transits through Bab el-Mandeb remain around half their pre-attack level more than two years after attacks began. Normality does not return quickly.

This is not just a geopolitical story. For most ports and terminals, the immediate consequence is not a new final destination but a less predictable arrival. Ships taking longer routes may still call at the same terminal, but revised ETAs can disrupt berth plans, surveyor attendance, documentation and downstream transport.

In some cases, both routes and destinations have changed. In March 2026, AFP reported that around 11 LNG tankers originally bound for Europe had been redirected to Asian markets as supply tightened and regional prices increased. During the same month, Reuters reported that Saudi Arabia was redirecting crude through its East-West pipeline to Yanbu on the Red Sea, with around 70 tankers expected to load at the port.

Freight, fuel and insurance costs rise at sea. If revised ETAs are not reflected in berth planning, documentation and stakeholder coordination in time, congestion and demurrage can add another layer of cost on arrival. 

The industry therefore needs to think beyond route resilience. It also needs operational resilience at the berth.

Chokepoints are remapping trade

The scale of chokepoint dependence is difficult to overstate. US Energy Information Administration data show that in the final quarter of 2025, before this year’s severe Hormuz disruption, 24.9 million barrels per day of oil and petroleum liquids passed through Malacca and 21.6 million through Hormuz. Suez and the SUMED pipeline handled 5.9 million, while Bab el-Mandeb handled 5.4 million.

By the second quarter of 2026, flows through Hormuz had fallen to 4.9 million barrels per day. Bab el-Mandeb flows rose to 8.1 million and volumes around the Cape of Good Hope reached 9.4 million. These shifts illustrate how rapidly trade is redistributed when a primary passage becomes unavailable.

Rerouting, however, does not create new capacity. It transfers pressure to different passages, ports and landside networks.

A longer voyage changes more than the estimated time of arrival. It affects berth plans, tank availability, surveyor attendance, pilot bookings, cargo documentation and downstream transport. A terminal may receive several revised arrival times while agents and service providers work from earlier versions.

That is how a disruption thousands of miles away becomes a queue at the jetty.

More than another route

Building strategic redundancy is essential. Expanded pipelines can bypass part of a vulnerable sea passage. Additional storage can create time to manage interruptions. Deepwater terminals in Southeast Asia and other consuming regions can broaden the network of facilities able to receive large vessels and redistributed cargoes.

Alternative land corridors also have a role. The International North-South Transport Corridor linking Russia, the Caspian region and Iran offers another connection between northern Eurasia and the Indian Ocean. But corridors of this kind remain complements, not replacements, for high-volume maritime routes. Rail capacity, port interfaces, border procedures and fragmented digital systems limit how much traffic they can absorb at short notice.

The lesson is that resilience requires a network rather than a single substitute. Infrastructure must provide options, while information must make those options usable.

This is where digital port-call coordination becomes part of supply-chain strategy. When a route changes, the arrival plan, cargo information, documents, tasks and approvals all need to move with it. If those updates are scattered across emails and spreadsheets, the disruption at sea becomes confusion at the berth. A shared digital workflow gives every participant the same version of the port call, so terminals can see what changed, who needs to respond and whether the vessel is ready to work.

A terminal cannot control events in Hormuz, Bab el-Mandeb or Suez. It can control how quickly a changed arrival is reflected in its planning, how reliably cargo information reaches operations and whether every participant sees the same version of the port call.

Email chains and spreadsheets struggle in stable conditions; under continuous route changes, their weaknesses become more costly. One missed update can leave a berth idle, a surveyor at the wrong location or an operational discrepancy unresolved until the vessel is alongside.

Supply chain resilience

A shared digital workflow should show what changed, who needs to respond and whether the terminal is ready to work the vessel. If a revised ETA changes the berth plan, the update should not sit in one person’s inbox while surveyors, agents and operations teams work from an earlier version. The schedule, documents, tasks and approvals should move together, so every participant can see the current state of the port call and act before the vessel arrives.

This does not eliminate disruption. It prevents external disruption from being amplified by internal fragmentation.

UNCTAD has warned that longer routes increase costs, strain vessel capacity and raise emissions. The IMF similarly notes that transport disruptions slow trade and affect import-dependent economies most severely. These consequences make every avoidable hour in port more significant: it is one of the few delays terminals can still influence. 

The answer is not another large technology programme designed in isolation. Terminals should begin with specific pressure points: schedule changes that fail to reach stakeholders, duplicated data entry, incomplete pre-arrival checks or documents that are validated too late.

Improving these workflows incrementally creates resilience now while allowing systems to develop with operating experience.

Shipping has traditionally planned around the shortest efficient route. It must now plan for routes that change, chokepoints that remain unreliable and cargo flows that arrive through unfamiliar patterns.

New terminals, pipelines, storage and corridors will be part of that response. But physical redundancy without operational coordination simply moves the bottleneck.

The supply chains that perform best will not be those that predict every disruption. They will be those that can reconfigure quickly and still be ready when the vessel reaches the berth.

Source: https://splash247.com/the-next-supply-chain-bottleneck-may-be-waiting-at-the-berth/