BHP told the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC, the United States markets regulator) on 19 August that disruption through the Strait of Hormuz had raised what it pays for sulphuric acid, diesel and ammonia. Singapore 10ppm gasoil, the regional diesel benchmark the miner buys against, rose about 60% in the second half of its 2026 financial year against the first, inside a rise of about 30% across the full year.1 Six other companies filed across the same two days and each put a figure on the same water.
Coty estimated on 19 August that the conflict cut fourth-quarter like-for-like sales, meaning sales stripped of currency moves and acquisitions, by about 1 percentage point. Its Prestige division, the group's high-end fragrance and cosmetics arm, saw like-for-like revenue fall 0.5%, with the conflict counted as a 1.5 point headwind inside that. Fourth-quarter revenue across Europe, the Middle East and Africa fell $45.3 million year on year.2 AIR Global told the SEC on 20 August that about 70% of its shipment volume normally moves through the strait, that March volume fell 38.6%, and that it booked $3.8m of supply-chain costs in the first half. It could not obtain glycerin from its contracted suppliers at all, though shipment growth resumed in June.3
The remaining three sit further from the water and still reached for it. Golar LNG booked a $9.6m rise in realised derivative gains, the profit banked when a hedge settles, as Brent climbed.4 ASP Isotopes is commissioning a South African liquid-helium plant with a design output of 70 Mcf a day, roughly 70,000 cubic feet.5 Estée Lauder put its conflict-affected Middle Eastern locations at about 2% of last year's net sales, an exposure small enough to have gone unremarked, and quantified the war anyway.6 Flex LNG, an owner of carriers for liquefied natural gas, is the outlier: its results cited industry sources reporting loadings at Qatar's Ras Laffan complex, the country's main LNG export terminal, running about 30 million tonnes below the same point in 2025.7 Flex relayed that count rather than measuring it.
What the other six have is their own money, attributed to a war by the people who wrote the accounts, and managements have obvious reasons to hand a weak quarter to a conflict. Four of the seven arrived as a Form 6-K, the interim report a foreign-listed company files, which does not carry the assurance of an audited annual account. Most of the numbers describe the company rather than the channel: a sales line, a cost line, a shipment count. The pattern across the seven is a construction we are making rather than one the filings assert. Mining, cosmetics, gas shipping, logistics and industrial gas share no exposure to one another beyond the water. Counting ships stopped producing an answer two providers could agree on, , and a company still knows to the dollar what the disruption cost it. These books also close four days after Abu Dhabi halted trade and financial dealings with Iran, so the next reporting season will price a shut settlement channel as well as a contested waterway.
