Alkagesta chief tells Motorship the shipping industry must act on spiralling costs

Transport costs across the world's key trade arteries have broken records that had stood since commodity price reporting began in 2005, and the industry that moves essential cargoes cannot treat those levels as permanent. That is the argument put forward by Orkhan Rustamov, chief executive of Alkagesta, in an exclusive opinion piece published by The Motorship.

The benchmarks he points to are striking: transits through both locks of the Panama Canal priced at up to US$2.5m, Black Sea tanker freight and Gulf-to-Far East crude routes at all-time highs, and Trans-Rhine barge costs at their steepest in 14 years after prolonged European drought. Rustamov's reading is that the combination of conflict risk around Hormuz and an increasingly disruptive climate is not a passing squall but the operating environment itself.

Treating that as a fait accompli, he warns, would be a costly mistake. Persistently rising freight invites regulatory scrutiny from governments and international bodies under pressure to act, and it erodes the standing of shipowners and traders as custodians of the resources the global economy depends on. The remedy he proposes is practical rather than political: the sector should bring forward its own solutions before they are imposed on it, an approach set out in the company's risk management framework.

Agility is the word Rustamov returns to. Shipping companies, in his view, should work far more closely with physical traders so that vessel selection, routing and freight are handled as one adaptive strategy rather than three separate procurement line items. That is close to how Alkagesta describes its own shipping and logistics function, which sits alongside the trading desk rather than downstream of it.

Diversity of supply sources, transport modes and route options should therefore be treated as a baseline requirement rather than an optional refinement. So should scenario planning: operators should already know what happens if a refinery or a port is unavailable for a month, and whether road or pipeline movements can carry the volume in the interim. Access to trade finance matters here too, since holding alternatives open costs working capital. The alternative does not need to be cheapest or perfect, Rustamov writes — it only needs to be viable.

His sharpest criticism is reserved for the industry's fixation on the live price. Media, brokers, suppliers and buyers all react most strongly to today's number, yet 2026, like 2022 before it, has shown that resilience is built in the boardroom over quarters rather than in the trading screen over hours. More than half a year into the Hormuz disruption, he suggests, there has been ample time to establish diversified supply networks and contingency plans — a point the firm's business model leans on.

The piece positions the trading house alongside a wider debate in maritime circles about who absorbs the cost of volatility. For a group whose business spans bunkering, refined fuels and carbon markets across more than 48 countries, the message is consistent with its own operating posture: plan for the shock, hold more than one route, and keep the trading desk and the shipping desk in the same conversation. Rustamov's remarks and the company's leadership and governance team are profiled further in the Alkagesta newsroom.