Malta-based commodity trading house Alkagesta has been featured in The Motorship, where chief executive Orkhan Rustamov argues in an exclusive opinion piece that the shipping industry itself must act to stop transport costs spiralling further out of control.
The piece opens with a striking benchmark. Since Argus began tracking key prices across the global shipping network in 2005, several significant price points have now broken records for the first time: a fee of up to US$2.5m to pass through both locks of the Panama Canal, freight rates for tankers in the Black Sea, and the rate for shipping oil from the Gulf to the Far East. Droughts across Europe have pushed Trans-Rhine freight costs to their highest level in 14 years.
Rustamov accepts that the on-off conflict in Hormuz and a worsening climate are persistent headwinds, but warns that treating them as a fait accompli would be a fatal mistake. Ever-rising prices, he writes, invite scrutiny and intervention from governments and international bodies, and inflict long-term damage on the reputation of the industry as custodians of essential resources. The same choke-point pressures were set out in the company's Alkagesta Market Insights series, including its July outlook on the Hormuz blockade and its August fuel oil market outlook.
Agility is the watchword of the argument. Shipping companies, Rustamov says, must be embedded with traders to build a physical trading strategy that adapts quickly to sudden events, rather than treating vessels, route choice and freight as separate parts of a narrow procurement exercise. Diversity of supply sources, transport modes and routes should be a basic requirement rather than a nice-to-have — and traders, with the network and global reach to move fast, are where that difference is made.
Scenario planning is the second pillar. Few assumptions can safely be made about any part of the supply chain: refineries and ports can be out of action at any moment, as the events of 2026 have shown. Contingency options — road transport, pipelines, alternative loading points — do not have to be perfect or cheapest, Rustamov writes; they only have to be viable.
His final criticism is aimed at the industry's fixation on the live price. Media, brokers, suppliers and customers all react most strongly to the market shifts of today and tomorrow, but 2026, much like 2022, has been a wake-up call to invest time, money and resources in the bigger supply chain picture. More than half a year into the Hormuz conflict, he argues, boardrooms have had ample time to begin building resilient, diversified supply networks — and doing so is what will keep prices from spiralling when the next shock lands.
Further commentary from the trading house is published on alkagesta.com, where its market insight notes track fuel oil pricing, freight and choke-point risk across Europe, the Mediterranean and Asia.
