The cost of transporting goods from Asia to the Middle East due to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz has reached a record high of more than $ 4,000, exceeding the levels of 2021 during the coronavirus pandemic, reports the British edition of the Financial Times (FT).
According to data from the analytical company Clarksons Research, cited by the newspaper, the delivery of a standard 20-foot container on the Shanghai-Persian Gulf-Red Sea route has increased from $ 980 before the outbreak of hostilities to $ 4,131, thus breaking the previous record of $ 3,960 in 2021 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. The growth is largely due to increased fuel costs and the desire to find new capacities for transporting goods by land.
The head of the transport company Moller-Maersk Vincent Klerk confirmed to the publication that this is a matter of “significant transport capacity“. According to him, countries in the region, including Iraq, Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, have started transporting cargo from ports in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Oman. The representative of the cargo company Hapag-Lloyd Rolf Haben Jansen noted that the capacity of land routes is much smaller than sea routes, which has led to a reduction in trade flows in the Persian Gulf region by 60-80%.le.ruf