Lloyd's List Intelligence counted 84 Strait of Hormuz transits in the week of July 27 to August 2, up from 45 the week before, and still called traffic depressed. [1] Non-Iranian-linked transits rose from 28 to 52. Containerships and gas carriers resumed after a short pause. [1] Thursday produced no new weekly table that reversed that judgment.
The paper's Wednesday feature said Lloyd's still counted depressed traffic. Thursday's owners did not treat Tehran's coordinates or IRGC control captions as a booking note. Four industry sources told Reuters the proposed deal is not feasible. [2]
Sixty-five ships that entered during the memorandum's calm have not left. More than seventy have remained since the conflict began. [1] Westbound non-Iranian-linked transits nearly doubled, to 21 from 11. Lloyd's warned against reading the uptick as confidence. [1]
CENTCOM still reports 45 merchant ships redirected, two disabled, and two boarded. [1] Since August 1, two ships on the Omani bypass have been struck. [1] Markets can hear a deal. The completed Thursday table is still a modest bounce, a stranded second cohort, and an industry that will move only when the risk calculation actually changes.
Lloyd's has said participants will move quickly if a credible development appears. [1] Thursday's fee-and-clause catch-22 is not that development. The 65 and the 70-plus are. Owners who escaped during the memorandum will not send a second cohort in on an adjective. They will wait for a published scheme, a published fee they can pay without voiding cover, and a week without explosions in Omani water. None of those arrived with the 84-transit bounce.
Shadow-fleet product tankers provided a slight lift in the Wednesday brief. VLCCs still shuttle crude west of Hormuz and offload by ship-to-ship transfer in the Gulf of Oman. [1] Those workarounds are how the industry already fakes a strait. They are not confidence. They are a calendar that could not wait. One departing LNG carrier was hit in transit in that same brief. [1] A desk that books the next gas hull will price that sentence before it prices Baghaei.
Thursday's Reuters sources explained the math Lloyd's would not dress up as a reopening. [2] Sanctions on the Strait Authority, a war-risk kill switch, and a fee Tehran will not drop are three reasons the 84-transit week stays "depressed" in the house's own adjective. [1][2] The paper reads Lloyd's. It will read Lloyd's again when the next weekly table lands. Until then the hold is the news.
-- HENDRIK VAN DER BERG, Brussels