Alice Hancock

Hey, Mark.

If you look at it, the Middle East region has been highly disrupted, obviously.

A fifth of the world's oil and gas transits the Strait of Hormuz normally.

So that being sort of effectively closed by Iran, who have exercised leverage over the Strait during this whole period, has obviously caused huge disruptions to energy markets, oil prices over $100 and so on.

But on the cargo and the container front, it's actually been a much more

No pun intended contained effect because the ships going into the Gulf were really serving the Middle East region.

So, yeah, good question.

If you think about the logistics of it, it's a narrow waterway.

It's about 38 kilometers wide at its narrowest point.

The Iranians, we think, have mined the strait.

Well, that's certainly what the U.S.

has said.

So for ship owners, they don't want to run the risk of sending their ships through that when they don't quite know what they're facing.

You've also got the estimate now is there's about 500 ships ready to exit.

And, of course, getting 500 ships through a narrow waterway doesn't happen overnight.

You've got to have a queue, you've got to make sure they don't all run into each other, and there's not kind of a big rush for the exit.

So there's also a sort of tangential issue, which is actually all these ships that have been stuck in the Gulf, they've grown a lot of barnacles and so on on the bottom of their hulls.

And that, in turn, actually affects fuel consumption because it creates a lot more drag.

So they need to get those cleaned.

And so there's a lot of issues you might not think about.