The Iran conflict has handed container shipping its most lucrative rate environment since 2022 as Drewry’s equity data confirms the windfall.
However, the same geopolitical machinery producing today’s rate floor is building tomorrow’s demand collapse and carriers have a narrow window to act before Phase Two arrives.
The numbers from Drewry’s Maritime Financial Research team, published March 6, tell a story that no container carrier’s investor relations department could have scripted.
In the seven days following US-Israeli strikes on Iran, while port equity indices fell, tanker equities retreated, and dry bulk stocks dropped 6.3%, the Drewry Container Equity Index rose 3.6%. Maersk gained 6.2%.
The sector is up 11.4% year-to-date. The shipping industry’s most structurally challenged segment the one that spent 2025 bracing for a wave of new tonnage from Chinese yards is currently the only major maritime sector that geopolitical catastrophe is making richer.
The mechanism is specific and must be understood precisely, because it contains within it the reason why this windfall will end.
The Iran conflict has not created new demand. It has destroyed supply and it has done so across two simultaneous corridors in a way that overwhelms the orderbook overhang that the market spent two years dreading.
Since 2023, the central structural threat to container shipping has been China’s dominance of the global shipbuilding orderbook approximately 62% of new tonnage on order through 2033.
The fear was textbook: too many ships chasing too little cargo, rates normalizing downward toward operating cost floors, carriers stripped of the pricing power they briefly enjoyed during Covid-era supply chain dislocation.
The Red Sea crisis bought time. Cape of Good Hope rerouting absorbed approximately 25 to 30% additional effective capacity through sheer distance the same ship could carry the same boxes fewer times per year.
But the Houthi ceasefire of November 2025 introduced a new anxiety: the prospect of Red Sea return, which would release that absorbed capacity back into the market in a single, sharp correction.
The Iran war has closed that window. The conflict has eliminated any near-term prospect of Red Sea transit resumption, and simultaneously introduced Hormuz disruption as a second, independent capacity-destruction mechanism.
Vessels stranded on both sides of the Strait. Unscheduled port arrivals generating congestion surcharges and extended turnaround times at major hubs. Effective capacity consumed not by longer voyages alone, but by idle days in yards operating at record density.
The Drewry World Container Index rose in the week ending March 5 after several weeks of decline. The supply-demand balance has tilted sharply, and for reasons the orderbook cannot reverse.
The equity market’s verdict on container shipping is correct in its assessment of Phase One. It is silent on Phase Two and that silence is where the risk lives.
Every cost that the conflict is generating for carriers will be passed to cargo owners. War-risk surcharges are already flowing. Bunker cost inflation from crude price spikes is compounding them. Congestion surcharges are layering on top. Individually, each cost increment looks manageable. Combined, they construct a sustained cost inflation environment that cargo owners will eventually refuse to absorb.
UNCTAD projected containerized trade growth of 1.4% for 2025 before the conflict began. That projection assumed no additional major disruption. It has been overtaken by events but so has the demand it was counting on.
When the cost of shipping a box from Shanghai to Rotterdam includes war-risk premiums on two corridors simultaneously, shippers do not simply pay. They defer, they reroute to shorter corridors, they rebalance supply chains toward regional sourcing that bypasses the East-West mainlane architecture entirely.
This is the demand destruction that Drewry’s analysts flag, carefully, at the end of their container sector assessment: sustained cost inflation could ultimately dampen the demand for global containerised trade. It is phrased as a risk.
The Phase Two scenario is mechanically straightforward.
Hormuz eventually reopens through ceasefire, diplomatic settlement, or military exhaustion. Red Sea returns become operationally viable. The latent capacity that two years of Cape rerouting has absorbed re-enters the market in a compressed timeframe.
It meets a demand base that has been structurally compressed by precisely the cost inflation that generated the rate floor carriers are currently enjoying. The correction, when it arrives, will be faster and deeper than a normal commercial cycle correction, because it will be triggered by geopolitical resolution rather than gradual supply-demand rebalancing.
Container shipping is winning a war it did not start, on terms it did not choose, through a mechanism it cannot control. The rate floor is real. The clock on it is running.
