PARIS: The closure of the Strait of Hormuz as well as tensions in the Red Sea are reshaping trade routes, with Africa becoming a hub for global container ship traffic, according to logistics and maritime sources.
Over the past two months, the blockade has also pushed shipowners to find alternative land corridors to transport food and manufactured goods by truck, as they can no longer reach Gulf coastal countries by sea.
What are the alternative routes to deliver to Gulf countries?
The Saudi port of Jeddah, on the Red Sea, is becoming a new regional “hub” where ships from maritime giants MSC, CMA CGM, Maersk and Cosco arrive via the Suez Canal.
The goods then leave by truck along a desert highway to be delivered to places like Sharjah, Bahrain and Kuwait, which have not been served by sea in the past two months.
“The port of Jeddah is not at all sized to handle such import volumes and a situation of port congestion is emerging,” said Arthur Barillas de The, co-founder of freight forwarder Ovrsea. AFP.
According to data from Kpler Marine Traffic, 11 container ships were docked in Jeddah on Thursday, with nine waiting, and an average wait of 36 hours before unloading, compared to 17 hours the previous week.
The shipowners said they would use three ports outside the Strait of Hormuz: Sohar in Oman and the UAE ports of Khorfakkan and Fujairah, which are connected by land from the UAE.
The port of Aqaba in Jordan serves as a base for sending goods to Baghdad and Basra in Iraq, while a Turkish corridor also allows goods to enter northern Iraq.
On international routes, why do Asia-Europe container ships avoid the Suez Canal?
The situation began long before the war in Iran, but it is closely linked to the conflict.
Avoiding the Red Sea from the Bab al-Mandeb Strait to the Suez Canal dates back to November 19, 2023 and the first attack on a container ship by Iran-backed Houthi militias from the coast of Yemen, said CyclOpe, a commodities publication.
The diversion of ships has now become systematic, underlines Ronan Boudet, head of container intelligence at Kpler.
They circumnavigate Africa along its eastern coast to the Cape of Good Hope in the south of South Africa before heading north towards Europe and the Mediterranean.
“With the current situation in the Gulf, we have put several more parts in the machine, it is not going to improve soon,” said Edouard Louis-Dreyfus, president of French shipping giant Louis Dreyfus Armateurs. AFP.
“Today, 70% of the freight traffic that passed through the Red Sea in 2023 is diverted via the Cape of Good Hope,” adds Yves Guillo, supply chain expert at Efeso, a management consulting firm in Paris.
According to data from the International Monetary Fund’s PortWatch platform based on ships’ GPS signals, commercial vessel traffic through the Cape of Good Hope has more than tripled in three years, while traffic through the Bab al-Mandeb Strait has more than halved.
Between March 1 and April 24, an average of 20 commercial ships circumnavigated the Cape of Good Hope each day, compared to six during the same period in 2023.
For comparison, traffic in the Red Sea has fallen: from 18 transits per day via Bab al-Mandeb between March and April 2023, the average fell to five three years later.
What are the consequences?
Transportation times have increased by two weeks on average between Asia and Europe and costs have increased because it requires 30 to 50 percent more fuel and 10 to 20 percent more ships to provide the same frequency of service, Guillo said.
The average price of transporting a standard 40-foot container on major shipping routes increased by 14% in April compared to the same period last year, he added, citing developments in the Drewry Freight Index.
There are big differences depending on the route: certain African ports are seeing their activity increase. The Tanger Med Autonomous Port indicated that it had processed 11 million standard containers in 2025, an increase of 8.4%.
But Egypt lost revenue from Suez Canal tolls, which make up a large part of its revenue. According to CyclOpe, in 2024, it lost $7 billion, a drop of more than 60% compared to 2023.
