Conflict upended business in the Strait of Hormuz on Feb. 28.
Six months later, supply chain disruption continues, the orders are down again, and the bill for moving anything is still rising.
Two numbers tell an interesting story: the price of a barrel of oil and the cost of moving a container. Both are set by traders pricing in what they expect next. Neither one tells a company whether its own costs have come back down.
The 9.2% freight reading comes five months after the initial shock, and weeks after purchasing in the region had already recovered to its earlier pace, as outlined in the Coupa Business Spend Index, built with the MIT Data Science Lab.
Key takeaways:
· Among businesses billed in the Middle East and North Africa, weekly purchase order value fell about 48% at the trough, from a pre-disruption run rate of roughly $160 million a week. Year-over-year order growth for that group went from 159% in February to negative 64% in March. The swing is the signal there, since growth rates in this series also reflect a widening set of companies on the platform. Invoice growth over the same two months slowed from 60% to 17%, which still reads as growth.
· Purchase orders move when the decision moves. A company watching only its payables in March would have seen business softening. Its commitments had already stopped. The recovery took about 13 weeks, and it did not settle.
· Weekly order value for those buyers returned to its pre-disruption run rate roughly 13 weeks after Feb. 28, which lands at the end of May. They found other routes, other suppliers, other terms, and got back to ordering while transport challenges persist. From mid-June the line slipped below that run rate again.
· Then July. Order and invoice value for buyers in the region were both down 31% year over year. Order value flowing to suppliers domiciled in the region, from buyers anywhere in the world, was down 35%. The ceasefire collapsed on July 7, so July is not a clean fifth month of recovery.
· In matched price data, inflation in the freight and logistics industry reached 9.2% year over year in July, the highest reading since the disruption, and still accelerating. Those prices had been flat or falling through most of 2025. Chemicals went the other way, peaking at 8.5% in May and easing to 3.1% by July. Freight is the one series still heading the wrong way.
· Among U.S. companies already buying from suppliers in the region before the destabilization, the median buyer cut purchase order value by about 23% over the five months after, and by 34% in July alone, and that cut was specific to the region. The same buyers held roughly flat everywhere else. Inside the group, 39% raised their Middle East orders and 47% raised invoicing, so a sizable minority leaned in while the typical buyer pulled back.
· Order value from North American buyers to suppliers in the region rose 65%, an increase of roughly $460 million, lifted by a small number of very large goods and services buyers. Both figures are real, and are drawn from different populations. The 65% covers all spend from U.S. buyers to Middle East suppliers, including companies that had no such supplier relationship before February.
· Purchase order growth for Middle East and North African suppliers swung down 133 percentage points. The world aggregate moved 8 points the other way.
· Cohorts with the heaviest pre-disruption Middle East sourcing reduced total order value by 19% to 31% and barely changed their supplier mix. Those cohorts are small, and are treated as directional.
· February's oil price told the world to expect the first part of the initial shock to the global economy. However, that data point could not have told anyone that the recovery would arrive in 13 weeks and then weaken again, or that the typical American buyer would keep cutting the whole way through. The purchase orders did.
