A building materials supplier in Qatar watched his costs nearly double in the weeks after Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz on February 28, and the product at the centre of the crisis was not oil, medicine or food, but a beam of Austrian spruce. That is according to Reuters, which this week reported that the per-piece price of a standard 2×4 structural framing beam, the kind used to support concrete pours and frame walls on construction sites across the Gulf, has climbed from QAR 23–25 (US $6.30–$6.90) to more than QAR 35–37 ($9.60–$10.20), a 52 per cent increase traced directly to the disruption of a supply chain that, until February, was entirely routine.
The supplier, who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity, had 17 containers of spruce at sea when US-Israeli airstrikes triggered the closure. Each container holds 2,850 of the two-inch-by-four-inch beams, known in the regional building trade simply as white wood, valued at €15,000 ($17,700) apiece.
The cargo had left the Croatian port of Rijeka as planned, but instead of sailing to Dubai’s Jebel Ali port for transfer to a feeder vessel bound for Doha, it was diverted to Khor Fakkan on the UAE’s eastern coast, a port that sits on the Arabian Sea outside the closed Gulf. From there, it was trucked overland to Abu Dhabi and reloaded onto new vessels for Qatar.
The detour added a surcharge of $3,600 per container, with some carriers quoting as high as $5,000, more than triple what it normally costs to ship a 40-foot container of timber from Europe to Qatar. As Wood Central reported, when the Hormuz closure occurred, it did what the Red Sea crisis never could: remove the destination entirely for forest products bound for the Middle East’s fastest-growing construction markets, leaving exporters with no detour and no timeline.
The cargo had still not reached Doha at the time the report was filed, with delivery expected to take an additional 1 to 2 months. A separate plywood order placed by the same supplier was loaded onto feeder vessels at Jebel Ali, spent weeks at sea, and was returned to port undelivered.
The 45-day transit cited as the pre-conflict standard had itself already deteriorated from roughly 30 days before Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping began in late 2023, with most shippers continuing to route around the Cape of Good Hope despite the easing of those attacks. The Hormuz closure hit a supply chain already running at more than double its pre-crisis speed, then added months.
Future shipments could cost more again, with routing via Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea port of Jeddah, now under active consideration, adding 1,500 kilometres of overland trucking across the Arabian Peninsula before timber reaches Qatar at all. Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait have no equivalent of Dubai’s advantage, whose ports at Fujairah and Khor Fakkan face the Arabian Sea and are entirely outside the closure zone, making all three countries structurally more exposed than any other market in the region.
Regional governments have moved to ease the pressure, with Saudi Arabia’s Transport Minister Saleh bin Nasser Al-Jasser announcing shared storage and redistribution zones at King Abdulaziz Port in Dammam and Dubai activating what it described as a green corridor with Oman for expedited customs clearance. Transport executives regard the solutions as imperfect, however, and expect flows into Dubai and other Gulf capitals to remain slower and more expensive regardless.
The wider picture is of a Gulf where the cost of ordinary goods has already shifted, with food, personal care products and industrial supplies up by five to 10 per cent across the region since late February. “You have only so many plugs for electricity, so you can only accommodate so many containers in the port,” said Geodis executive Eric Martin-Neuville, describing port congestion bottlenecking refrigerated medicines alongside framing timber.
Ravi Punjabi, Managing Director at UAE-based Avalon General Land Transport, told the wire service that a container of onions from western India to Dubai now takes three weeks at twice the pre-conflict cost, whilst Geodis, which had planned to fly medicine from the UK to Dubai in four days, now expects the same journey to take approximately 40 days overland and sea.
As Wood Central reported, European lumber exports to the UAE had already fallen 14 per cent in January, the final full month of normal trade before the closure, with February and March data expected to show a sharper contraction as Austrian and Swedish sawmillers hunt for replacement markets after losing one of their most consistent growth corridors.
White wood is not a strategic commodity, and the report is careful to say so, but a shortage of 2×4 framing beams will slow construction sites and drive up building costs across a region already paying a premium on almost every imported good. The Qatari supplier holds enough stock for several months but must soon place new orders, without knowing which route will be open or what a standard beam of Austrian spruce will cost by the time they are needed.
