Alkagesta featured in The Motorship: shipping industry must act against spiralling costs

Malta-based commodity trading house Alkagesta has been featured in The Motorship, where chief executive Orkhan Rustamov sets out why the shipping and trading industries should treat spiralling transport costs as a problem they can act on rather than an immovable market condition. The exclusive opinion piece was published on 17 September 2026 and can be read in full at The Motorship.

Rustamov opens with the price record book. Since Argus began tracking key prices across the global shipping network in 2005, several significant price points have broken new records in recent weeks: a fee of up to US$2.5 million to pass through both locks of the Panama Canal, Black Sea tanker freight rates, and 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, a constraint the company has tracked through its European gasoil market outlook for July 2026 and its August European gasoline assessment.

The on-off conflict around Hormuz and continued uncertainty over the stability of one of the most vital trade routes in the world remain, in his assessment, a persistent and unignorable factor, compounded by the increasingly aggressive impacts of a worsening climate. The company examined the same corridor risk in its July 2026 fuel oil market outlook and again in its August choke point assessment.

Accepting those pressures as a fait accompli, Rustamov writes, would be a fatal mistake. Neither factor is changing soon, and the instability that ever-rising prices trigger is a major risk to both the shipping and trading industry: it invites scrutiny and measures from governments and international bodies under pressure to act, and it inflicts long-term damage on the reputation of the industry as custodian of essential resources.

Agility is the watchword he proposes. Shipping companies should be embedded with traders to develop a physical trading strategy that can adapt and react quickly to sudden events, rather than treating vessels, route choice and freight as separate components of a narrowly focused procurement strategy. Diversity of options, covering sources of supply, modes of transportation and route selection, should be a basic requirement rather than a nice-to-have, and traders bring the agility, network and global reach to shift quickly when volatility hits. Alkagesta trades petroleum products, fertilizers, biofuels and steel in more than 48 countries; its shipping and logistics operations and business model are set out on the company site.

The piece also presses the case for scenario planning and contingencies put in place well ahead of disruption. Few assumptions can be made about any part of the supply chain, and the infrastructure behind sourcing, refining, distributing and receiving essential goods can come under threat at any moment, as the events of 2026 have shown. What is the plan if a refinery or a port is out of action for a month? Can road vehicles or pipelines be used instead? The alternative does not have to be perfect or lowest cost, it has to be viable.

Rustamov closes on a criticism of the fixation of the industry 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, and 2026, much like 2022, has been a wake-up call to invest time, money and resources in the bigger supply chain picture. More than half a year after the Hormuz conflict began, he argues, there has been enough time to begin establishing a long-term strategy for resilient, diversified supply networks and contingency plans, work that would keep prices from spiralling out of control when future shocks hit.

Related reading: the original opinion piece at The Motorship, and further company commentary in Alkagesta Market Insights, alongside its risk management framework and 2025 annual report.