Maersk turned in a Q1 2026 EBITDA print of $1.73 billion, comfortably ahead of the $1.66 billion analysts had expected, but the more important signal from the world's second-largest container line was the message its chief executive sent to the market about how long the Iran war's energy shock will last.
Maersk chief Vincent Clerc, fielding questions on the call and to wires after the result, refused to frame the bunker fuel surge of the last two months as a temporary distortion that resolves the moment the Strait of Hormuz reopens. The damage to global energy supply chains, in his telling, has already done its work.
"The energy crisis does not go away the day peace comes," Clerc said.
The arithmetic behind the warning is severe. Bunker fuel, the heavy residual oil that powers the world's deep-sea shipping fleet, has roughly doubled since the Iran war began on 28 February 2026, running from around $600 per metric tonne pre-war to close to $1,000 per tonne in the weeks after Tehran shut the Strait of Hormuz. For Maersk, that translates into approximately 3 billion Danish kroner (about $472.7 million) of additional cost every month, a number Clerc said the company simply cannot eat without passing it down the supply chain.
"It is not something we can just absorb," the chief executive said.
The customer conversation, by his account, has moved past resistance and into reluctant acceptance. Importers, retailers and exporters across the Maersk customer book are now negotiating bunker-adjusted contracts that lock in the higher fuel base for the back half of 2026, even as the diplomatic track in Washington opens a possible 30-day truce window.
"They can understand, even if they don't like it, why we have to do it," Clerc said of customer conversations on the surcharges.
He was equally direct on the duration of the underlying squeeze. The conventional market read of an Iran ceasefire is that crude eases, refining margins compress and bunker fuel follows oil down to pre-war levels. Clerc, citing the calls he is having with major energy producers, painted a different picture.
"Oil companies I speak to expect it to last at minimum several more months, possibly many more months," he said.
The operational picture sits behind those quotes. Maersk's Red Sea reroute around the Cape of Good Hope, in place since the original Houthi disruptions of early 2024, has now been compounded by the Strait of Hormuz blockade, lengthening voyage times into Asia, raising vessel utilisation, and forcing the company to pay simultaneously for higher fuel, longer routes and tighter port windows. EBITDA still fell from $2.71 billion in Q1 2025, a reminder that the beat-and-hold guidance hides a year-on-year squeeze that sector analysts now expect to persist into Q3.
Despite the headwinds, Maersk left its full-year 2026 outlook unchanged, sticking with global container volume growth guidance of 2-4% for the year and signalling that booking patterns from European and Asian customers had stabilised after the initial post-Hormuz panic.
The company flagged the Upper Gulf, which accounted for roughly 6% of global container trade in 2025, as the single biggest downside variable for the rest of the year, with higher energy prices and any extension of trade restrictions in the region cited as the headline risks to volume growth in its own outlook commentary.
For a market trying to price how quickly an Iran framework would unwind the war risk premium that has dominated freight rates and oil since late February, Clerc's message is unambiguous. The peace, when and if it arrives, will fix the headlines. It will not, on his read, fix the energy bill.