On June 14, the US and Iran announced a deal that the Strait of Hormuz reopens. The signing happens this coming Friday, June 19th.
That is an important political event but the operational one runs on a different clock.
What the numbers actually say
Today, more than 800 vessels are still stranded inside the Gulf. Insurance premiums that averaged 0.25% of vessel value before February have surged to between 3% and 8%. That translates to $3-8 million per transit for a large tanker. Insurers have said publicly they will not normalize rates until the region shows sustained stability, which they measure in months.
Logistics analysts put vessel repositioning at 8-12 weeks, assuming the reopening holds. Full freight rate normalization, based on what happened after the 2024 Red Sea disruption, extends across multiple quarters. However, some forecasters are pointing to the second half of 2026 at the earliest.
There is also a congestion problem that has not gotten much attention yet. When the strait reopens, ships that took the Gulf route will arrive at European and Asian ports at roughly the same time as ships that spent the past months rerouting around Africa. Two delayed streams converging on the same ports at once means 2-3 weeks of port congestion on top of everything else.
The strait opening is a headline but the backlog isn’t, and right here is a problem.
What I am seeing on the operations side right now
The teams I spoke with over the past three months did what they always do when their systems stop reflecting reality – they built spreadsheets. Manual exception lists, daily allocation calls, side trackers that captured what the ERP could not show. Those workarounds kept things moving.
The risk now is that the same teams assume those workarounds can be switched off because the news says the crisis is over.
The delayed stock is still delayed. Purchase orders that look stalled in the system have not been formally resolved. Customer commitments made against arrival dates that are now weeks out of date have not been renegotiated. None of that clears on the day the strait reopens. It clears when each of those threads gets worked through, one by one, by planners who are still looking at the same legacy systems they had before February.
For most retailers and distributors, that work happens across June and July, without urgency, without visibility, under the assumption that the problem is behind them.
The pattern
The Strait of Hormuz closed in 2019 over tanker attacks. The Red Sea disrupted in late 2023, and the IMF reported a 50% year-over-year drop in Suez Canal trade by early 2024. Then Hormuz in February 2026. Each time, the interval between events is shorter. Each time, teams that had no visibility layer scrambled to build one out of spreadsheets.
A furniture supplier we worked with during this closure had no usable picture of which inbound shipments were at risk, which were already allocated to customers, and which were generating duplicate replenishment orders because the original POs looked stalled. We built a working visibility layer on top of their existing ERP in three days. A pharmaceutical distributor cut duplicate data entry by 60-70% in the first week by consolidating exception views across their systems into one ranked queue.
Neither required replacing any core infrastructure; the data was already there. It just could not be surfaced in a usable form.
The window
Recoveries are when this kind of work actually gets done. The urgency is lower, budgets are available, and the pain is recent enough that nobody has forgotten what it cost.
The companies that handled this disruption better than the last one did not wait for a crisis to expose the gap. They used the previous recovery window to close it.
The strait is reopening Friday. That is good news. But the supply chain problem it exposed has been there for years and will still be there next week.
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