霍尔木兹封锁或致迪拜与阿布扎比中转货量永久流失

By Gavin van Marle

30 September 2026

The closure of the Hormuz Straits, now approaching its eighth month, has been predicted to lead to the permanent loss transhipment traffic for the Gulf’s two largest container facilities, Jebel Ali and Khalifa.

Prior to the outbreak of the US-Israel-Iran conflict, the two UAE ports were a favoured waypoint for relay transhipment operations – boxes moving between Asia-Europe vessels and ships deployed on north-south trades.

However, a combination of soaring insurance premiums on vessels passing though Hormuz and the major carriers redesigning their networks to insert alternative transhipment calls could spell the death knell for port operators DP World and AD Ports’ hopes of reinvigorating their transhipment volumes when the conflict ends.

“Relay transhipment doesn’t come back – ever,” said Eirik Hooper, Drewry’s senior associate for ports and terminals said in the consultancy’s Freight Loop podcast yesterday.

“It’s the most price elastic and least sticky cargo type in container shipping because it follows network design, not geography.

“So once MSC has moved a call to Khor Fakkan; once CMA CGM has built its logistics capability at Sohar; once the carriers have rebuilt their networks around Salalah, Colombo, Vizhinjam or Jeddah, there’s no case for reinstating a Hormuz transit to serve cargo that never needed to enter the Gulf,” he added.

And he further argued that the July agreement signed between by DP World and Fujairah Port Authority for a 50-year concession to construct two terminals outside Hormuz indicated that DP World management had likely come to a similar conclusion.

Both DP World and AD Ports reported huge declines in first half volumes at Jebel Ali and Khalifa respectively, due the war, forcing their owners to look elsewhere for growth.

“DP World is building 2.5m teu capacity outside of Hormuz and is marketing it as an extension of the Jebel Ali ecosystem – I don’t think you can simultaneously argue for a full Jebel Ali transhipment recovery, whilst its owner is planning for the opposite,” he said.

At the same time, Khor Fakkan owner and operator Gulftainer has drawn up plans to take its annual capacity from 3.5m teu to 10m teu, although this appears to be partly predicated on its new role as a Gulf bypass port that has managed to keep container flows continuing into the Gulf markets.

Additionally, he said there was little chance of a decline in insurance premiums for vessels transiting Hormuz: “Insurers will not restore pre-2026 pricing for a strait that’s been mined and blockaded, and a hub whose access carries a persistent risk premium and cannot win price-sensitive relay cargo against a Salalah or Colombo – that’s structural, not cyclical.”

Pre-war insurance rates for Gulf-bound ships hovered around 0.1%-0.2% of the vessel’s hull value and went up to anywhere between 2.5% and 7.5%, “depending on whose book you’re looking at”, he noted.

However, given the enormous supply chain infrastructure investment the Dubai government has made over the past four decades, Mr Hooper believed Jebel Ali would continue to have a major role to play in regional container supply chains.

“There’s still a big business there – [upper] Gulf transhipment plus re-export businesses, which are materially smaller, but still substantial.

“It will keep its preeminence regionally because of the JAFZA free trade zone, the warehousing, the industrial cluster, the cargo airport – it’s taken four decades to build that out and you can’t relocate it overnight.”

But Abu Dhabi’s Khalifa port, which has been nibbling away at Jebel Ali’s dominance for the past few years, was “a bit more exposed because Kizad [the Khalifa free trade zone] can’t claim the same size, longevity, or breadth of customer base to anchor it.

“That’s the harder conversation for that shareholder group,” he added.

The three big wins for Khalifa in recent years was due to a shift from a common-user terminal model to dedicated carrier terminals, developing joint-venture facilities with Cosco, CMA CGM and MSC.

However, with network redesign forced upon carriers by the war, those volumes have gone elsewhere and carriers are using large amounts capital to support the new networks.

“The Hormuz crisis is driving deal making directly – with Jebel Ali and Khalifa inaccessible, MSC needed a structurally safer relay hub outside the Gulf, and one where it held equity; hence it acquiring 49% of Adani’s Vizhinjam for $1.4bn,” he said.

Despite the deal being held up by the local state authority over questions of common access, “given MSC’s volumes, it’s our view that it will eventually get approved rather than refused, but there may be some conditions attached,” Mr Hooper said.