Hormuz Reopens. Your Inbound Recovery Clock Starts Now.

Three months. That is your real planning window. The Strait of Hormuz reopening is a headline, not a solution. Experts project cargo flow won't return to pre-disruption volume for at least 90 days. Every container you expected in July is now a probability, not a commitment. Act on that now.

What Is Actually Moving Through That Strait

The agreement opened passage. It did not unclog port queues. It did not reset carrier allocation schedules. It did not put containers back on ships that rerouted through the Cape of Good Hope weeks ago. Rerouted vessels are still mid-voyage. Port congestion at connecting hubs—Jebel Ali, Singapore—hasn't cleared. Carriers are not immediately repositioning capacity to a strait they spent months avoiding. The 90-day recovery estimate from DC Velocity reflects that operational drag, not diplomatic optimism. Your inbound team needs to treat every Hormuz-origin PO as delayed until proven shipped.

The SKU-Level Problem You Have Right Now

Pull your inbound velocity report by ASIN. Sort by days of cover. Anything under 30 days of cover on a high-sell-through SKU is a revenue exposure. Circle it. Now cross-reference against which of those SKUs originated from suppliers routing through the Gulf region. That intersection is your triage list. Do not manage this at the category level. Manage it at the SKU level. A category might look healthy on average while one anchor ASIN goes out of stock in week three of July. That is a lost Buy Box. That is suppressed ranking. That compounds for weeks after restock.

Landed Cost Has Already Changed. Reprice Accordingly.

Cape of Good Hope rerouting added roughly 10 to 14 days of transit and $400 to $900 per container in incremental freight cost, depending on vessel class and origin port. Those numbers were absorbed quietly during disruption. Now that Hormuz is nominally open, some brands will assume costs snap back. They won't. Spot rates will stay elevated until carrier capacity fully repositions and shippers rebuild confidence. Run landed cost by SKU against your current retail price. If your NetPPM dropped more than 4 points on a Gulf-origin SKU, you have a margin problem that won't self-correct when the strait opens. You may need to adjust pricing, negotiate a freight credit with your carrier, or shift that SKU to air for one cycle to protect sell-through and margin simultaneously. Choose deliberately. Don't drift.

The Inventory Arbitrage Most Brands Will Miss

Here is the operational opportunity hiding in this disruption. Your competitors in the same categories are facing identical inbound gaps. The brand that reaches a domestic 3PL with available inventory, or pulls forward a nearshore supplier PO, fills that shelf while others go dark. Every week a competitor is out of stock on a high-demand ASIN is a cohort of new customers you can capture and retain. They don't come back automatically when your competitor restocks. Some stay. Build a 48-hour decision protocol: when a top-20 SKU drops below 21 days of cover and the inbound PO is flagged as delayed, the automatic response is to source a domestic substitute or authorize emergency airfreight on units needed to cover the gap. Decision latency is what kills this window. A protocol kills the latency.

Three Questions to Pressure-Test Your Position

First: For each SKU with inbound exposure through Gulf-routing, what is the specific day you go to zero on current DC inventory? Not a range. A day. Second: Has your team recalculated NetPPM on those SKUs using actual post-rerouting landed cost, not the cost from your original PO? Third: If your top three revenue ASINs go out of stock for two weeks in July, do you have a documented sourcing fallback ready to activate, or does someone have to start making calls from scratch? Answer those three. Then act.