The impact of the Iran war on container shipping is reaching well beyond the Persian Gulf, creating ripple effects upstream at ports around the world. 1/ 🧵

Today Salalah Port (on Arabian Sea, not Persian gulf) was struck by and is now officially closed. See the Flexport Atlas map to see how far Salalah is from the Gulf. 2/

Flexport has only 12 containers currently either stuck in the port of Salalah or en route to the port. All those customers are being notified as we speak. 3/

Scroll through the list of services that call at Salalah or Jebel Ali (Dubai's container port, the 9th largest in the world) to get a sense for all the container shipping routes that call at these ports, which must now be re-rerouted. 4/

Importantly, Salalah is the port where Hapag Lloyd and other ocean carriers were leaving containers bound for Persian Gulf ports. 5/

Maersk and MSC stopped accepting bookings to gulf ports a few days ago. Hapag and others were continuing to accept bookings and planning to leave them in Salalah. We are waiting for clarity on where they will begin leaving containers now that Salalah is closed, and if they will stop accepting bookings bound for the Persian Gulf soon. 6/

MSC has declared "end of voyage" on all ships bound for Persian Gulf ports, and presumably those bound for Salalah as well. This means they are dropping all containers bound for those ports in the next port of call of the ship they are on, regardless of where that may be in the world. 7/

To illustrate the point, if you have a container on an MSC ship on this route, going from Buenos Aires to Jebel Ali, you are waking up today to find out your containers have been dropped off at the next port of call. 8/

Those businesses are waking up this morning to learn you have a container sitting in a random port, say Santos, Brazil or Tangier, Morocco. That container is will start to accrue demurrage charges (storage fees, typically around $150/day) as you only get ~7 days free storage in the port. 9/

If you want to get that container out of the port to end the charges, you'll either need to get it loaded on another ship going somewhere else, maybe back where it came from. MSC is not taking bookings to the gulf so your original routing is no longer an option. 10/

Alternatively, you could take it out of the port you can either clear customs (assuming you have a legal entity in this random country you didn't plan for your cargo to arrive in) or you can move it into a foreign trade zone. 11/

In either case you'll need to have a local logistics provider with to handle customs issues, offer drayage trucking to move the container out of the port, plus a service to unload and return the MSC container back to the port, and provide warehousing (ideally a bonded warehouse/FTZ if you don't have a legal entity). 12/

If you can't organize all that you'll find yourself accruing ~$150 per day per container in demurrage fees. Oh and by the way, there's an $800 end of voyage charge that you're on the hook for no matter what. 13/

Working in logistics is hard. There's pretty good job security though. Being able to figure all that out for a company is non-trivial, and a great way to create value for businesses that honestly don't want to have to think about this madness. They just want to make great products and connect with customers to sell them. 14/

It also shows you why rules-based automation is so hard in our industry—good luck writing rules to handle all this. And it makes it clear that the only true solution today is experts in logistics and customs compliance with a worldwide physical network to solve these problems. 15/

Over time though, we think most of this can in fact be handled by properly trained AI agents that understand the local rules and regulations, have access to the same data and execution platform as our people. 16/

But edge cases like this are probably last on our list of places where Flexport's AI is going to solve the problems and illustrate just how important it is to have service providers willing to roll up their sleeves and solve problems. 17/

The tech helps—for us finding out which containers are impacted and making a plan was trivially easy thanks to our data platform. But there's no substitute for elbow grease and passion for problem solving. 18/