Hormuz transits collapse over 95% by tonnage, Clarksons data shows

The Analysis

Clarksons put a number on the table on 24 July and it travelled faster than the ships did not. Traffic through the Strait of Hormuz was down more than 95 percent by tonnage, about 13 vessels a day on 25 and 26 July against roughly 88 a day before the trouble started. The headlines wrote themselves: near closure, the chokepoint seized, supply chains choking. I made myself read the release twice before reacting, because the moment a 95 percent drop hits your screen your stomach says the lane is dead. It is not, and the gap between the headline and the harbour is worth more than the panic.

My seat on this desk is to take the number apart before I tell you what to do with it. Show me the number, not the feeling. This one, once you pull it open, tells a quieter and more useful story than the one going around.

If you ship containers for a living, the first thing to hold onto is that Hormuz is an energy artery, not a box highway. The ships that vanished are crude and product tankers and gas carriers. Yours are still sailing, most of them nowhere near the Gulf. Keep that in mind; it decides what you actually owe your forwarder this week.

Start with the hard numbers, because everything else hangs on them and most write-ups dropped at least one of them. Clarksons Research put this out on 24 July 2026. Before the latest escalation, traffic through the Strait of Hormuz ran about 88 vessels a day. On 25 and 26 July it was down to roughly 13 a day. Measured by tonnage, that is a fall of more than 95 percent. Underneath that headline sit four details that change the read.

More than 70 percent of the ships that could still be identified were running the Iranian-side corridor rather than the normal traffic separation scheme. About one vessel in four had switched off its AIS transponder and gone dark. MarineTraffic counted only 29 verified transits across 24 to 26 July, and of those exactly one used the traditional lane. Reuters, citing Kpler, said fewer than ten commodity carriers a day crossed that weekend. Those four lines are the whole story, and the order matters: the lane is still moving ships, most of them on a different track, and a chunk of them are invisible.

Now take the first number apart the way this desk trains you to. The 95 percent is measured by tonnage, not by ship count. A very large crude carrier moves on the order of two hundred thousand deadweight tonnes. A coastal products tanker moves a few thousand. When the giant hulls pull out, total tonnage collapses fast even if the number of smaller ships barely moves. So the sentence '95 percent of the cargo is gone' and the sentence 'vessel count is down to 13 a day' are two different facts, and the space between them is the entire point. The headline sells the tonnage figure because it is the scarier of the two. The harbour is still moving boxes and smaller ships; it is just moving a lot less weight.

We can put a number on that gap. Suppose the old 88-a-day mix carried, say, a heavy share of crude and LNG hulls averaging well over a hundred thousand tonnes each, and the new 13-a-day mix is mostly smaller vessels averaging perhaps a tenth of that. Then the ship count fell by roughly 85 percent while the tonnage fell by over 95 percent. Both are bad, but they are not the same bad, and only one of them is the number the newspapers printed. When a release leads with the tonnage figure, it is telling you about tankers, not about you.

Why this week and not in the spring. The people who actually decide whether a ship enters a contested strait are not the embassy briefings, they are the war-risk underwriters and the charterers. When the insurance market reprices transit risk, an owner's maths flips overnight. A single voyage's war-risk premium on a large hull can run into six or seven figures, and a total loss inside a mined lane is uninsurable at any price. So the crude and LNG carriers pulled out first and hardest: they carry the most value per hull and the most tonnage per transit, which is exactly why the tonnage number fell faster than the ship count.

What stayed in the water is a different fleet, smaller vessels, and a large share hugging the Iranian side where they judged the risk lower or where they had local cover. The data is showing a reroute inside the strait, not a shutdown of it. That distinction is the difference between a manageable insurance story and a true blockade, and the two get conflated in almost every headline I saw.

Layer the impact and it stops being one event. Tanker owners and their charterers eat it first and directly: cancelled liftings, renegotiated term deals, a war-risk premium that compounds every week the situation drags. Energy importers in Asia and Europe that lean on Gulf crude and gas see their landed feedstock cost move within days as freight and insurance load onto the cargo. Container lines feel it one step removed: bunker prices track the oil move, and any vessel they route near the region now carries a war-risk line they will pass straight to you as a bunker adjustment or an emergency surcharge. NVOCCs and the smaller forwarders sit at the end of that chain with the least room to absorb it, which is why the pain shows up last and lingers longest for the mid-size shipper.

And you, the box mover, on transpacific or Asia to Europe? Your containers do not go through Hormuz. The strait carries roughly a fifth of the world's seaborne oil and a large slice of LNG, not consumer boxes. Your direct exposure to the 95 percent number is close to zero. Your indirect exposure is the bunker and insurance pass-through, and that is real but small unless the situation escalates from reroute to closure. I would rather you spent your worry budget on the surcharge line than on the transit count, because only one of those two touches your invoice.

Timing is where the guessing goes wrong. The transit collapse was effectively instant: it is in the 25 to 26 July count, days after the escalation. War-risk insurance reprices on the same clock, sometimes inside a single trading session, because underwriters price fear in real time and a notice of cancellation can land between one voyage and the next. The bunker-linked surcharge is slower: carriers fold it into the next bunker adjustment or general rate increase review, which runs on a weeks-not-days cycle. So the energy shock hits spot tanker rates and insurance this week; it reaches your container all-in rate at the next surcharge window, probably two to four weeks out. If you are booking spot now, you are already standing inside that window. If you are on a contract signed before the trouble, you have a buffer until it rolls, and that buffer is the single most valuable thing you own this month.

Here is the part almost nobody wrote, and it is the part you should act on. The story got framed as a supply-chain chokepoint crisis. For containers, it is not. The 95 percent is a tanker-and-tonnage story, and the vessels still moving, 13 a day with most of them on the Iranian side, prove the strait is contestable but not closed. The 'near closure' language is mood, not shipping. For an importer or exporter of manufactured goods, the honest read is that this number is mostly noise for your lane. The thing that actually touches your landed cost is war-risk insurance and the bunker adjustment, and today those are modest line items, not a freight explosion. I have lost count of the panicked 'should we reroute everything' calls I got off that headline, and the answer was the same every time: your boxes were never in that water.

The second missed point is a data one, and it is exactly the kind this desk looks for. About a quarter of the ships went dark by switching off AIS. Dark vessels are hard to count, so the '29 verified transits' and the '95 percent drop' rest on a base that is itself partly invisible. The real figure could be a touch narrower or a touch wider than reported; we cannot know, because the ships that matter most for the uncertainty are the ones not broadcasting. Treat the 95 percent as a directional signal with an asterisk, not a measured constant. A number with a quarter of its sample missing is a number with a caveat, and the caveat is the story the headline skipped. This is the discipline I keep: when the source admits a quarter of the population went dark, the precision of the headline is a costume.

The conclusion flips on one condition. If the ceasefire holds and the Iranian-side corridor stays open and underwriters keep writing cover, transits recover to maybe half or two-thirds of the old daily count within weeks, the war-risk premium eases, and your container surcharges stay in the modest range. If instead the strait is mined, or a major carrier is hit and the insurance market pulls cover entirely, then it stops being an energy story and becomes your story too: bunker spikes, emergency surcharges on any route that touches the region, and a scramble for alternative routing. The trigger to watch is not 'transits fell below some line.' It is 'the insurance market walked away.' Below that line, watch and plan. At it, act. Everything else is commentary on a tanker chart.

Put numbers on the indirect hit so it is not hand-waving. Plain assumption, stated up front: you move 40 FEU a month on Asia to US, your pre-trouble all-in rate is 5,500 dollars per FEU, and a regional war-risk plus bunker combination adds, say, 350 dollars per FEU once carriers pass it through. That 350 is a scenario figure drawn from the scale of past Gulf risk events, not a number lifted from the Clarksons release; I am labelling it as a what-if, not a quote. On 40 FEU that is 14,000 dollars a month of extra cost, about 6.4 percent on the freight line.

Small in percentage terms, annoying in cash, and the kind of thing a contract rate signed before the event would have absorbed entirely. The arithmetic is the point: the pain is real but bounded unless the boundary above is crossed. If instead the boundary is crossed and that 350 becomes 1,000 or 1,500 per FEU, the same 40 FEU goes from 14,000 to 40,000 or 60,000 dollars a month, and that is the moment the reroute and the inventory buffer stop being optional and become survival.

You can ask your carrier to swing Gulf-adjacent legs via the Cape instead of Suez, but that adds two to three weeks and its own bunker bill, so only do it if your cargo genuinely touches the region. You can shift some volume to air or rail, but the cost gap makes that a panic move for most box freight, and it ignores that your boxes were never in the strait to begin with. The real trap is over-reacting: locking a sky-high spot rate this week because a headline said 95 percent, when your lane never went near Hormuz.

The line I use with customers is simple. Once the combined war-risk-plus-bunker surcharge crosses roughly 8 to 10 percent of your base freight and the insurance market is still writing, that is the moment to lock a contract and stop riding spot. Below that, ride it and watch the boundary. Above it, or the moment cover walks, you should already have space booked on the next cycle and a backup routing mapped, because the window between 'we should' and 'we cannot' is about three days wide in a market like this.

Put the two importers side by side so the split is visceral. The Gulf energy buyer watching this print sees their raw material freight and insurance move within days, and a single cargo can swing six figures on the war-risk line alone; for them the 95 percent is lunch. The transpacific box buyer watching the same print sees nothing on their invoice this week and maybe a few percent at the next surcharge window; for them the 95 percent is a headline they should not have opened. Same number, two completely different wallets, and the mistake almost everyone makes is assuming the number that scares the energy desk scares theirs. It does not, and acting as if it does is exactly how you lock a rate you never needed.

One operational note if any of your cargo does brush the region. A quarter of the ships going dark means your track-and-trace goes blind exactly when you most want it. If a box you care about is on a vessel near the strait, the status pings can simply stop, not because the ship is lost but because it stopped broadcasting. Build that into your exception handling: a missing ping in this window is a 'call your forwarder' event, not an 'assume worst' event, and it is one more reason to keep the war-risk and bunker lines separate so you can see what you are actually paying for a risk you cannot see.

Run that same 40-FEU lane through three tiers so the range is explicit rather than a feeling. Mild: the boundary holds, the combined surcharge settles at 200 dollars per FEU, cost is 8,000 dollars a month, about 3.6 percent on freight, and a contract signed before the event absorbs all of it. Moderate: the surcharge lands at 350, cost 14,000 a month, 6.4 percent, noticeable but survivable, and the trigger I gave you has not yet fired. Severe: the boundary breaks, surcharge at 1,500, cost 60,000 a month, 27 percent, and this is the only tier where the reroute and the inventory buffer stop being optional. The point of the tiers is that you pre-decide your move at each one, so the market does not decide it for you on a Tuesday. These are built off the quoted band and a stated floor, not a rate sheet; I am showing the shape of the risk, not quoting a number.

How do you read next week's Clarksons print so you are not fooled twice. An honest release breaks the daily count by vessel type, reports the AIS-dark share on its own line, and shows the Iranian-corridor share separately. If next week's number arrives as a single tonnage percentage with no type split, treat it as a headline, not a measurement. The figure I will be watching is not the total; it is the share of large crude and LNG hulls that come back. When the big hulls return, tonnage recovers faster than the panic implies, because each one carries the weight of ten small ships. Until that share moves, the strait is still a tanker problem, not your problem.

On the contract side, the one clause worth asking for is a bunker and war-risk line that is index-linked with a cap, rather than open-ended. Carriers will sell you a flat all-in and keep the upside; what you want is a base plus a documented formula, so that when the boundary above breaks, your surcharge is calculable before you book, not handed to you after. State the assumption plainly: a cap set at, say, 1,200 dollars per FEU for the combined war-risk and bunker line would have held the severe tier I ran to a manageable number instead of 1,500 or more. The clause is the cheap insurance; the rate is the expensive one.

The last thing to keep straight is which index moves when. Container rate indices barely twitched on this event, because the boxes did not move; the tanker and war-risk indices are the ones that gapped. If you are watching the Drewry or Shanghai index waiting for Hormuz to show up, you are looking at the wrong dial. The box index tells you about space and front-loading, the tanker index tells you about the strait, and only the second one is live here. Mixing the two is how a quiet container market gets read as a crisis. Yours is the quiet one; hold that thought when the next panic lands.

The other pitfall is reading this as a container-rate story at all. It is not yet. It is an energy and insurance story with a long tail that might reach your freight only if the boundary breaks. Spend this week checking which of your lanes, if any, route near the Gulf, asking your forwarder for a separated war-risk and bunker line on those, and pre-booking space on the next cycle rather than chasing the rate. The rate will follow the insurance, not the other way round, and the insurance is the only gauge worth watching. That is the whole move: stay calm, separate the tanker chart from your box invoice, and act only when the cover walks, not when the headline screams.

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— By Vivian Zhao