DP World

Dubai-owned DP World and Maersk’s terminal arm APM Terminals are tightening their grip on one of the Middle East’s most geopolitically sensitive logistics corridors: the Red Sea. The two companies have signed a memorandum of understanding to “jointly develop” the Jeddah Islamic Port in Saudi Arabia, aiming to expand capacity, improve operational efficiency, and market Jeddah as a regional transshipment hub, according to maritime trade outlet gCaptain.

The deal is framed in the usual vocabulary of global commerce—connectivity, efficiency, supply chains. But the timing is the tell. The Red Sea has been steadily rebranded from a trade lane into a security theatre, with naval escorts and threat briefings becoming part of the cost of moving containers. When shipping requires warship accompaniment, “free trade” starts to look less like markets and more like a cartel with armed customer service.

DP World, a state-backed Emirati port operator, has spent two decades acquiring terminals and logistics assets across choke points from the Horn of Africa to the Mediterranean. APM Terminals, controlled by Denmark’s A.P. Moller-Maersk, brings global liner networks and terminal management expertise. Their Jeddah partnership plugs directly into Saudi Arabia’s broader ambition to turn the kingdom into a logistics platform linking Asia, Africa, and Europe—an ambition that depends on predictable throughput in a corridor that is anything but predictable.

As risk rises, the value of scale, insurance leverage, and government relationships rises with it. Smaller operators and independent shippers don’t get to amortize missile threats; conglomerates do. Meanwhile, states that cannot reliably police their waters outsource “stability” to a mix of state navies and state-adjacent infrastructure giants.

What makes Jeddah especially interesting is that it sits on a route where commercial decisions increasingly hinge on security guarantees that only governments can provide. That is a subsidy in all but name—paid by taxpayers funding naval deployments, and by consumers paying higher freight rates. The port operators capture the upside: higher strategic indispensability, stickier contracts, and a larger role in routing choices as carriers weigh Red Sea transits against longer diversions.

The region’s logistics “modernization” is being built on the assumption that militarization is the new normal. If escorts are permanent, then ports become dual-use infrastructure by default: commercial nodes whose profitability depends on the credible threat of state force. In that world, the line between market coordination and geopolitical management doesn’t blur—it disappears.

For now, DP World and APM Terminals are selling the Jeddah project as competitiveness. But in the Red Sea of 2026, competitiveness is increasingly a function of who can buy—directly or indirectly—the most protection.