Early on, most of the Red Sea discussion was about additional sailing days. That was the easiest effect to see and the easiest to put in a spreadsheet. It was only part of the picture.
Going around the Cape of Good Hope also kept vessels tied up for longer, disturbed schedules and cut the effective capacity available to the market. When the same ships need more days for each round trip, fewer sailings are available over the same period, even though no ship has left the fleet. By the middle of 2024, vessel tonnage transiting the Suez Canal had fallen sharply. Importers felt it in changing transit estimates, blank sailings, equipment shortages and rates that no longer behaved the way they did before the disruption.
By then the detour had stopped being a temporary exception. It had become the route.
A longer route can still be reliable. The trouble starts when it is sold on an old schedule, or when planning inside the buying company still assumes the Suez timing. We would keep two numbers apart. The first is the carrier's advertised transit time. The second is the complete planning lead time, which should include the likelihood of rollover, the real departure pattern, transshipment risk and the time needed after arrival. The first number is what appears in the quotation. The second is what the customer actually experiences.
The gap between them matters most when a purchase decision rests on a narrow landed-cost difference. A supplier may be marginally cheaper while the route adds another cycle of working capital, because the goods are paid for and still at sea for longer. A production deadline may look comfortable until two schedule changes eat up the buffer. Neither effect shows in the unit price, which is why both are easy to miss.
Trying to predict when a geopolitical route will normalise is not much of a plan. Nobody in the supply chain controls that timing. What we can control is whether offers and customer promises are built around the route that is actually operating.
If the shorter route becomes dependable again, the recovered time is a real advantage and can be passed on to customers. Until that happens, our planning assumes the longer route.