The headline everyone will carry is the 7% move and the beat: underlying EBITDA of $3.0bn for the second quarter against a company-compiled consensus of $2.12bn, revenue up 20% year-on-year to $15.8bn, EBIT of $1.6bn versus $845m, group EBIT margin at 10.0%. The number that actually describes the year is buried in the guidance table. Maersk has now raised full-year underlying EBITDA three times — $4.5-7bn on 7 May, $8-10bn on 29 June, $10.

The honest answer is that container traffic is further gone than tanker traffic, and for reasons that have almost nothing to do with how the war ends. Crude can move on a shadow fleet with the transponders off. A 19,000 TEU boxship on a fixed weekly rotation cannot. What is being lost is not the waterway. It is Jebel Ali’s position as the default first port of call for the Middle East.

The clearest price signal in the Iran war is not coming from crude. It is coming from box rates on a trade lane that runs nowhere near the Persian Gulf. Spot rates from the Far East to the U.S. West Coast now sit 276% above where they were at the end of February, before the U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran. East Coast rates are up 232% over the same window.

COSCO’s decision to restart container-ship bookings between Asia and the Gulf is less a routine logistics update and more a signal flare in a deeply fractured maritime landscape. After weeks of disruption, where vessel traffic through the Strait of Hormuz slowed to a near standstill, the move suggests that shipping is beginning to adapt—not to stability, but to a new kind of managed uncertainty. The Strait, long treated as a neutral artery of global trade, has effectively shifted into a controlled passage.