Guangdong, China’s most commercially important manufacturing province, is being hit by a sharp rise in electricity prices as disruptions in Middle Eastern gas supply ripple into its power system. The province, whose economy is roughly comparable in scale to South Korea’s, relies more heavily than any other part of China on gas-fired generation.

That dependence has become a liability at a moment when conflict around the Persian Gulf has curtailed fuel shipments and driven up the cost of imported liquefied natural gas. In mid-April, spot electricity prices in Guangdong surged to their highest level in three years, briefly reaching almost 680 yuan per megawatt-hour, far above the roughly 350 yuan average seen the previous month.

Copper is rising because the market is being pulled by two forces at once: a modest improvement in overall risk appetite after Trump extended the Iran ceasefire, and a renewed incentive to ship metal into the United States while the Comex premium over London remains open.

On Wednesday, LME three-month copper reached $13,448.5 a ton, its highest level since February 27, before easing slightly. At the same time, the Comex premium over the LME benchmark re-emerged this month, reviving the arbitrage that has already been a defining feature of the copper market in 2025.

The effort by EIT RawMaterials and Metalshub to create European critical-mineral price benchmarks is significant because it targets one of the least visible but most important obstacles to building a non-Chinese supply chain: price formation.

New mines, refineries, and processing projects can talk about strategic autonomy all they want, but investors still need a transparent reference price to underwrite financing, structure offtake agreements, and judge project economics. Right now, that remains extremely difficult in many critical minerals because China still dominates both processing and price discovery.

Asia’s LNG market is adjusting to the Gulf shock, but it is doing so through contraction rather than resilience. Imports are set to fall to about 19.03 million metric tons in April, the lowest since June 2020. That decline reflects the near disappearance of Qatari supply to Asia after the closure of Hormuz, with April arrivals from Qatar expected to collapse to about 800,000 tons from an average of just over 6 million tons in the three months before the war.

What makes this adjustment look less chaotic than the oil market is that the burden is being distributed unevenly. China, the region’s biggest LNG buyer, is absorbing much of the shock by cutting imports sharply and, earlier in the crisis, even reselling cargoes into a tight market.

The aluminium story is increasingly not just about the metal trapped on the way out of the Gulf, but about the raw materials blocked on the way in. Gulf smelters depend heavily on imported alumina to keep operating, and the Iran war has disrupted those inbound flows just as surely as it has disrupted outbound aluminium shipments.

Emirates Global Aluminium’s Al Taweelah alumina refinery and smelter complex was damaged by Iranian missiles, while other Gulf producers have already reduced output. That means the supply shock is now working through both finished metal and the feedstock chain beneath it.

The past few years have begun to look less like a run of bad luck and more like the outline of a new energy era. The post-pandemic inflation surge in 2021, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and now the Iran war together amount to three major energy shocks in roughly five years, a pace far above the rough postwar pattern of one major crisis per decade.

That alone would be destabilizing. What makes it more serious is that the drivers behind these shocks, like geopolitical rivalry, fractured trade, and strategic competition over supply chains, are not fading. They are becoming more deeply embedded in the global system.

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has revived an old Asian strategic fear: if one maritime chokepoint can be weaponized, every other chokepoint starts to look less like neutral geography and more like latent coercive leverage. That is why attention has shifted so quickly to the Strait of Malacca.

The waterway is the shortest maritime link between East Asia and the Middle East and Europe, stretches about 900 kilometers, and remains one of the most heavily used shipping lanes in the world. It carries roughly 22% of global maritime trade and, in the first half of 2025, about 23.2 million barrels per day of oil, making it the world’s largest oil transit chokepoint, even larger than Hormuz on that measure. More than 102,500 ships transited it in 2025, up sharply from 2024.

The European Commission is trying to thread a very difficult needle: give governments more room to shield vulnerable sectors from the Iran war’s energy shock without recreating the kind of broad, expensive support schemes that still weigh on public finances after Covid and the 2022 gas crisis.

Brussels will loosen state-aid rules next week, retroactive to March and running through the end of 2026, so governments can subsidize fuel and fertilizer costs in the hardest-hit sectors such as farming, fishing, and road transport. At the same time, the Commission is explicitly framing the help as targeted and temporary, precisely because it fears a new round of blunt crisis spending.