India’s narrower trade deficit in March looks better at first glance, but the improvement is not a sign of underlying strength. It reflects disruption. The merchandise trade gap fell to $20.67 billion from $27.1 billion in February, well below market expectations, because both imports and exports dropped as the Iran war disrupted shipping and trade flows through the Middle East. Imports fell 6.5% year on year to $59.59 billion, while exports fell 7.4% to $38.92 billion.

The key point is that India’s trade balance improved because trade itself weakened, especially with West Asia. The commerce ministry said exports to the Middle East fell by about $3.5 billion in March, while imports from the region dropped by $8.7 billion. That larger fall in imports than exports mathematically narrowed the deficit, but it does not represent a healthier external position.

China’s aluminium exporters are benefiting from a classic wartime trade realignment: when a key producing region is disrupted, buyers scramble for the nearest large-scale alternative, and China is by far the biggest one. The conflict in and around Iran has impaired supply from the Gulf, a region that accounts for roughly 9% of global aluminium output, while premiums in overseas markets have widened sharply relative to Chinese prices.

That has created a strong incentive for foreign buyers to source more semi-finished aluminium products from China just as domestic inventories have climbed to their highest level in six years.

India’s attempt to build a serious domestic battery industry is running into a hard geopolitical reality: in the most advanced clean-tech sectors, New Delhi cannot yet separate industrial ambition from Chinese technology. The clearest example is Reliance Industries’ battery project in Jamnagar.

The company pushed aggressively to secure as much as $1.1 billion worth of Chinese equipment for what is meant to be India’s most important lithium-ion cell manufacturing venture, only to find that tighter Chinese controls on battery-related technology and equipment had created a new bottleneck. Some machinery has already arrived in Gujarat, but commercial production still cannot begin on the timetable originally imagined without additional access to Chinese know-how and equipment.

China’s independent refiners, the so-called teapots, are emerging as one of the clearest stress points in the global oil disruption triggered by the Iran war. These smaller private refiners, concentrated mainly in Shandong, built their business model around buying heavily discounted sanctioned crude from Iran, Russia, and Venezuela, then surviving on wafer-thin margins that would be difficult for conventional refiners to tolerate.

That model worked as long as geopolitical risk produced cheap feedstock. It is now under strain because the same geopolitical upheaval that once created their advantage is starting to remove it.

The war around the Strait of Hormuz is creating a brutal new strategic dilemma for the Gulf monarchies: even if exports resume more normally, they may have to accept a world in which their most important trade artery is effectively controlled by a hostile power able to extract payment for access.

That changes the logic of the region’s energy infrastructure. For decades, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, and their neighbors treated Hormuz vulnerability as a serious but manageable geopolitical risk. Iran’s ability to interrupt traffic and then potentially monetize its partial reopening means the risk has moved from theory to structure.

European refining margins have flipped from windfall to stress because the recent surge in fuel prices has been more than offset by an even sharper increase in the cost of securing physical crude. In northwest Europe, light sweet hydroskimming margins averaged minus $6.45 a barrel in the week beginning April 6, while medium-sour cracking margins also fell into negative territory. Only light-sweet cracking stayed positive, and even there profitability weakened sharply.

The background to this reversal is that March initially looked like a bonanza for refiners worldwide. Middle distillate cracks surged as the Iran war disrupted flows through Hormuz and tightened diesel, jet fuel, and related product markets. In Singapore, March margins were about 14 times February levels, while northwest European light sweet hydroskimming margins in March were more than nine times February levels, at around $15.20 a barrel.

Japanese refineries are still running far below normal because replacing Middle Eastern crude is proving harder in practice than it looks on paper. Utilization was 67.8% in the week through April 11, almost unchanged from 67.7% the previous week and still well below the 80%-plus levels seen before the war began in late February.

That tells you the core problem is not just availability of crude in the abstract, but the difficulty of securing the right kinds of crude quickly enough and running them through plants built for a very different import structure.

China is considering whether to restrict exports of advanced solar manufacturing equipment to the United States, a move that would mark a significant escalation in the clean-tech rivalry between the two countries. Officials have begun preliminary consultations with equipment suppliers, including discussions around higher-end tools used to make more efficient solar cells, but no final rule has been adopted and the process has not yet reached the stage of formal industry consultation.

The background is that China’s dominance in solar no longer rests only on low-cost panel production. It also extends deep into the manufacturing ecosystem itself. China produces more than 80% of the world’s solar panel components and is home to the top suppliers of the machinery used to make solar cells.