Shipping is betting on more ships thanks, in no small part, to the disruption created by fewer reliable routes. That contradiction ran through much of Splash's coverage this week.

Panama, Hormuz, the Houthis, Somali pirates and the Black Sea were constant presences in the reporting. Different threats, different causes, same result: the arteries of global trade are becoming harder to rely on.

At Panama, the enemy is the weather. Fresh restrictions are coming as the canal — a waterway that normally carries around 5% of global seaborne trade — prepares for another difficult dry season with El Niño to the fore, reviving memories of the drought-induced disruption that transformed global shipping patterns earlier this decade, when daily transits were slashed and some owners paid millions at auction for scarce passage slots.

In the Middle East, the stakes are considerably higher. Hormuz remains shipping's most important geopolitical pressure point — roughly a fifth of the world's oil passes through the strait each day — with no sign of a breakthrough between warring factions.

Further west, the Houthis continue to cast a shadow over the Red Sea. Suez traffic is finally showing meaningful signs of recovery, but the return remains tentative. Owners know how quickly one missile, drone attack or fresh threat can send ships back around the Cape of Good Hope, a diversion that adds around ten days to an Asia–Europe voyage.

Somali pirates, meanwhile, are again making themselves felt around the Gulf of Aden.

Then there is the Black Sea, where attacks on ports, terminals, ships and export infrastructure have made maritime trade an increasingly central component of the war between Russia and Ukraine.

The common denominator is inefficiency. Ships sail further. Voyages take longer. More vessels are required to move the same volume of cargo. Fuel bills rise. Insurance costs climb. Tonne-mile demand increases. Ports struggle, as sister title Splash Ports investigated today.

Disruption can be extraordinarily profitable for shipowners. And the industry appears to be betting heavily that some of it is here to stay.

The other great theme of the week came from the shipyards.

Growth in the global shipbuilding orderbook is now running at 27% year-on-year, the fastest pace since the eve of the Lehman Brothers collapse, with contracting volumes tracking the extraordinary ship-ordering boom of 2007.

China continues to add shipbuilding capacity at remarkable speed. Dormant facilities are being revived, established builders are expanding, and yards previously focused on smaller domestic tonnage are moving into larger oceangoing ships.

Japan is responding with its own shipbuilding revival, pouring money into automation, zero-emission vessel production and yard expansion as Tokyo tries to recover some of the market share surrendered to China and South Korea over the past two decades.

The logic behind much of this ordering is understandable. Geopolitical fragmentation has been extremely good for shipping demand. Sanctions have created longer trading patterns. Red Sea diversions have absorbed huge amounts of containership capacity. Changing oil and gas flows have boosted tanker tonne-miles. The restructuring of commodity supply chains has done much the same for dry bulk.

Every unreliable chokepoint effectively creates a requirement for more ships. But this is where the week's two big themes collide.

Owners are ordering assets that will trade for 20 or 25 years, many of them not due to deliver for another three years or more given current shipyard queues, partly against market conditions created by disruptions that can disappear far more quickly.

Suez could normalise. Panama rainfall could recover. Wars eventually end. Sanctions change. Pirates are suppressed. Ships are rather harder to make disappear.

That is why comparisons with the last great ordering boom are becoming commonplace. In 2007, owners also had compelling reasons to believe the extraordinary shipping market of the day would endure. Shipyards filled up, delivery slots disappeared and money poured into new tonnage. Then the world changed. The Baltic Dry Index fell from above 11,000 in mid-2008 to under 1,000 by the end of that year, and the industry spent years afterwards absorbing tonnage ordered for a boom that had evaporated.

Next month, SplashTech will launch its first ever magazine, designed to become shipping's go-to annual report on where the industry stands on its digital transformation path. Over the past week, SplashTech readers have been given a flavour of what to expect from the new publication, something that has been compressed into this week's Splash Wrap podcast.