Alkagesta chief urges shipping industry to act on spiralling freight costs

Alkagesta chief executive Orkhan Rustamov has called on the shipping and trading industries to stop treating record transport costs as an unavoidable feature of the market, in an opinion piece published this week by The Motorship.

His starting point is the price record itself. Since the commodities publisher Argus began tracking key shipping costs in 2005, several benchmarks have just broken new highs at the same time: a fee of up to $2.5m to pass through both locks of the Panama Canal, Black Sea tanker freight, and the rate for moving oil from the Gulf to the Far East. Drought on the Rhine has pushed Trans-Rhine freight to its highest level in 14 years. Alkagesta's position is that the industry now has a responsibility to limit the long-term damage of that trend rather than wait it out.

It is tempting, Rustamov writes, to put all of this down to the ferocity of events. The on-off conflict around Hormuz and continued uncertainty over one of the world's most important trade routes is a real and unignorable factor, as is a worsening climate. But accepting that as a fait accompli would, in the Alkagesta chief executive's view, be a fatal mistake: neither factor is going away soon, and steadily rising prices are themselves a systemic risk to shipping and trading alike.

The consequences he sets out are commercial and reputational. Persistent price instability invites scrutiny and intervention from governments and international bodies under pressure to act, and it erodes the industry's standing as custodian of essential resources. Alkagesta's argument is that practical solutions have to come from the industry itself, for the here and now as much as the long term.

Agility is the watchword. Shipping companies, Rustamov argues, should be embedded with traders so that physical trading strategy can adapt quickly to sudden events, instead of treating vessels, routes and freight as separate line items in a narrow procurement exercise. That close working relationship with traders is the practical core of what Alkagesta is proposing.

Diversity of supply sources, transport modes and route options should be a basic requirement rather than a nice-to-have for every operator. Traders, in the Alkagesta view, have the network, reach and daily habit of working at speed needed to shift when volatility or geopolitical shocks hit.

Scenario planning is the other half of it. Assumptions can be made about very little of the supply chain: refining, storage, distribution and port infrastructure can all come under threat at short notice, as 2026 has shown. What happens if a refinery or a port is out of action for a month? Can road transport or pipelines carry the volume instead? An alternative does not have to be perfect or cheapest, Alkagesta's chief executive notes — it only has to be viable.

Underlying all of it is a criticism of the industry's fixation on the live price. Brokers, suppliers, customers and the media react hardest to today's and tomorrow's market moves, but 2026, much like 2022, is a reminder to put time, money and people into the wider supply-chain picture. That, Alkagesta argues, is the conversation boardrooms in shipping companies and trading houses should be having.

More than half a year into the Hormuz conflict, there has been time enough to begin building resilient, diversified supply networks and contingency plans. The prize, on Alkagesta's reading, is both reputational — protecting the industry's position as custodian of the resources that power the global economy — and commercial, keeping prices from spiralling out of control when the next shock lands.

The full opinion piece by Alkagesta's Orkhan Rustamov was published by The Motorship on 17 September 2026.