Alkagesta Chief Executive Urges Shipping Industry To Act On Spiralling Transport Costs

Malta-based global commodity trading house Alkagesta has been featured in *The Motorship*, which published an exclusive opinion piece by chief executive Orkhan Rustamov on the record transport costs now working through global shipping and trading markets.

The argument is direct: those responsible for moving essential resources around the globe cannot accept high transport costs as an immovable fact of life. According to the piece, several significant price points have broken new records for the first time since the commodities publisher Argus began tracking key prices across the global shipping network in 2005.

Records across the network

The costs cited include a fee of up to $2.5 million to pass through both locks of the Panama Canal, together with fresh highs in Black Sea tanker freight rates and in the rate for shipping oil from the Gulf to the Far East. Droughts across Europe have also pushed Trans-Rhine freight costs to their highest level in 14 years — the same inland waterway pressure the trader mapped in its fuel oil market outlook for August 2026 and revisited in its September 2026 fuel oil outlook.

Two factors sit behind much of the move: the on-off conflict around the Strait of Hormuz and continued uncertainty over the stability of one of the world's most vital trade routes, and the increasingly aggressive impacts of a worsening climate. Alkagesta set out the earlier stage of the Hormuz disruption in its Hormuz blockade fuel oil market outlook for July 2026, and assessed the reopening scenarios in a follow-up outlook on Hormuz and the oil market.

Why acceptance would be a mistake

Treating that combination as a fait accompli would, in Rustamov's view, be a fatal mistake for the industry. Neither factor is changing soon, and the instability that ever-rising prices trigger is described as a major risk to both the shipping and trading industries. It invites scrutiny and measures from governments and international bodies under pressure to act, and it risks long-term damage to the industry's reputation as custodian of essential resources.

The alternative is for the industry itself to come forward with practical solutions that work in the here and now as well as over the longer term.

Agility is the watchword

The piece argues that shipping companies must be embedded with traders to develop a physical trading strategy that can adapt and react quickly to sudden events. Too often vessels, choice of route and freight are treated as separate components of a narrowly focused procurement strategy. Alkagesta runs chartering and voyage execution through its own shipping and logistics function, alongside a dedicated shipping division in Malta.

Diversity of options — sources of supply, modes of transportation and route selection — should be a basic requirement rather than a nice-to-have for every operator. That is where close work with traders makes the difference: traders have the agility, network and, in many cases, the global reach to shift quickly in the face of volatility and sudden geopolitical eruptions. Working at speed is what their daily lives are about. The company publishes its own reading of those conditions through Alkagesta Market Insights.

Scenario planning before things go wrong

The industry also has a responsibility to scenario plan and to put contingencies in place well ahead of disruption, because assumptions can be made about very few parts of the supply chain. Infrastructure behind sourcing, refining, distribution and receipt can come under threat at any moment, as the events of 2026 have shown. That thinking is set out in the trader's notes on geopolitical risk and global logistics strategy and its approach to risk management, including work on demurrage risk and port congestion.

The practical questions are concrete. What is the plan if a refinery or a port is out of action for a month? Can road vehicles or pipelines be substituted if required? An alternative solution does not have to be perfect, and often will not be the lowest cost — it just has to be viable. Contracted tank capacity matters here too, as the trader's global storage operations illustrate.

Beyond the live price

A final theme is that the industry has become too fixated on the live price. Focusing on the immediate price of tradeable goods will not put shipping companies and traders in a strong long-term position, even though media, brokers, suppliers and customers understandably react most strongly to the market shifts of today and tomorrow. Like 2022, 2026 has been a wake-up call to invest time, money and resources in the bigger supply chain picture.

More than half a year into the Hormuz conflict, the piece argues there has been enough time to begin establishing a long-term strategy for resilient, diversified supply networks and contingency plans — work that would help keep prices from spiralling out of control when future shocks hit. Rustamov has made a related argument on structural change in crude pricing in European Business Magazine and in City A.M..

Further background on the trader's markets and desks is set out in what it does, its business model and its trading operations.