Iran's Chief of Staff of the President says despite the blockade of the southern ports, where 75% of the country's imports were made, the amount of imports has decreased by only 25%, ISNA reports

Iran's Chief of Staff of the President says despite the blockade of the southern ports, where 75% of the country's imports were made, the amount of imports has decreased by only 25%, ISNA reports.

The headline is a damage-assessment statement from within the Iranian presidency, and official claims of this kind in past blockade and sanctions episodes have tended to understate disruption, so the figure is best treated as a floor on stress rather than a measurement. The mechanism that matters for the Energy & Power tag is the rerouting channel: a large share of imports previously cleared through southern ports is being pushed onto land corridors and secondary ports, which historically raises freight, insurance and transit costs and lengthens delivery times before it shows up in headline volumes. The distinction worth drawing is between volume resilience and cost resilience; episodes of this kind have typically preserved flows through neighbouring states while quietly widening the fiscal and inflationary burden, and it is the latter that tends to feed back into currency and subsidy pressure. The statement also functions as signalling, an assertion to domestic and external audiences that the blockade is not biting, a posture repeated in comparable standoffs whether or not conditions supported it. Follow-ons worth watching are whether third-country transshipment hubs show elevated traffic, any move in war-risk premia or tanker insurance for Gulf shipping, and whether the blockade widens from commercial to energy flows, since that step has historically been the inflection point for crude and refined product pricing.