225 companies named the Strait of Hormuz. Two priced it.

Between April and August 2023, not one American company filed a quarterly report containing the words Strait of Hormuz. Not one in 2022 either, and none in 2021.

In the same five months of 2026, 422 filings used the phrase.

That is the cheapest possible measure of what happened to the waterway this year, and it takes about thirty seconds to produce. The expensive part is reading what those filings actually say, and the reading turns up something the count does not: naming the strait has become routine, and saying what it did to you has not.

What the filings say happened

The timeline is in the documents, not in a news archive. Donaldson’s quarterly report dates the start precisely — on 28 February 2026 the United States and Israel began a military operation against Iranian targets, and Iran retaliated with, among other things, “a blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.” Seadrill prices the same fortnight: Brent was $71 per barrel on 27 February, and averaged approximately $103 through the June quarter.

Then the volumes. Core Laboratories, which runs crude assay work for producers, writes that approximately 20% of global crude oil production passes through the strait, that a substantial portion of it “remains stranded,” and that the disruptions produced a 15% to 20% reduction in the global cargo movement of crude and refined products in the second quarter against the year before. International Seaways puts world oil production at 97.2 million barrels a day in that quarter, 6.4 million lower than a year earlier, attributing the fall to effects related to the closure. Expro reports LNG capacity shut in across Qatar and the UAE equivalent to around 20% of global supply.

W&T Offshore supplies the turn: on 18 June 2026 the United States and Iran signed a memorandum of understanding covering, among other things, the re-opening of the strait. Prices eased. The filings kept coming.

The census

We took every Form 10-Q filed between 1 April and 31 August 2026 that contains the exact phrase, then narrowed it in four steps. Each step throws something away, and it is worth seeing what.

Filings returned by full-text search      422
Matched inside the 10-Q, not an exhibit   416
Distinct registrants                      251
Operating companies                       225

Against that, the same query in earlier years returns almost nothing. Eleven filings in the April to August window of 2025. Two in 2024. None in 2021, 2022 or 2023. The prior high in the full-text era was nine, in 2019, the year of the Gulf of Oman tanker attacks. This year is about 38 times last year’s count, and it is not a story about oil companies discovering a new phrase — it is a story about everyone else.

It is not an energy list

Of the 225 operating companies, 148 sit outside energy, mining, transport and utilities. The group spans 110 distinct SIC industry codes.

Dow and Union Carbide are both here, with near-identical paragraphs about petrochemical feedstock. So are Valero, Baker Hughes, Peabody, Textron, Flowserve, Littelfuse, Donaldson, Plug Power, Kulicke & Soffa, McGrath RentCorp, Herbalife and Coty. A freight forwarder, Expeditors, is here because its offices in seven Middle East countries were disrupted from late February.

The two that put a number on themselves

Across all 225, the pattern is unmistakable. Companies are fluent about the world and mute about themselves. Dozens quantify the strait — barrels a day, percentages of global supply, the price of Brent. Two state a figure that is their own impact.

The first is a fruit company. Del Monte Corporation, which files as a Cayman-incorporated registrant trading in New York as DMC, reports that gross profit for the first half of 2026 was “negatively impacted by $2.3 million of charges, including $0.6 million of sales claims and $1.7 million of other product-related charges, primarily due to customer quality claims, product damage, and inventory write-offs related to disruptions to shipping lanes in the Strait of Hormuz.” The filing then splits it by segment: $1.5 million in bananas, $0.8 million in fresh and value-added products. Against first-half gross profit of $210.3 million, the charge is 1.1% — small, specific, and the only dollar figure of its kind in the census.

The second is a sonar maker. Coda Octopus Group sells underwater imaging equipment, much of it into the Gulf. In the quarter ended 30 April 2026 its Products business generated $2,839,592 against $3,878,090 a year earlier — a decline of $1,038,498, or 26.8% — which the filing attributes “primarily due to the reduced demand for our goods and services caused by the ongoing conflict with Iran and the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz.” Revenue from Asia and the Middle East fell from $2,770,898 to $2,046,989, down 26.1%.

Two companies, two orders of magnitude apart in what the strait meant to them. One lost about one percent of a half-year’s gross profit to damaged cargo. The other lost a quarter of a segment.

What the other 223 say instead

A smaller group answers the question with an adjective, which is at least an answer. Expeditors, having listed seven disrupted countries, concludes that “the financial impact on our MAIR region operations in the first half of 2026 is not material and is mitigated by our ability to adjust the routing of our customers’ shipments.” International Seaways, a tanker owner, says the developments “have not had a material adverse effect.” Kulicke & Soffa says the same of its Israeli facility.

Leggett & Platt shows how far a company can go while still saying that word. Its filing reads: “Although not material, in April 2026, the Iranian government seized a commercial vessel transporting containers of goods purchased by one of our subsidiaries.” The next sentence reports that Iranian strikes on two Qatari energy fields caused a global shortage of helium, a gas the company notes is essential to semiconductor manufacturing, and that it is watching the effect on its Automotive group. A seized ship and a worldwide gas shortage, filed under not material, with no figure attached to either.

Most companies never reach the question at all. The phrase turns up in one of two places. It sits in Item 1A risk factors, under headings that state the hazard in the conditional — Big Sky Industrial’s runs “Geopolitical Conflict and Disruptions to Global Energy Markets, Including Risks Associated with the Strait of Hormuz, May Adversely Affect Our Business, Financial Condition, and Results of Operations,” and PEDEVCO’s is the same sentence in the plural. Or it sits in the cautionary list bolted to forward-looking statements, where hazards are enumerated and none is weighed — International Seaways prints the strait in exactly such a list, between acts of piracy and the war in Ukraine.

Some of the language is not even the filer’s own. Dow and Union Carbide, which are affiliated and so might be expected to match, run a byte-identical section headed “STATEMENT ON MIDDLE EAST CONFLICT.” Herbalife and Stran & Company, a nutrition business and a promotional-products business with nothing in common, both file the sentence “Maritime restrictions in the Strait of Hormuz will continue to influence this risk” — identical, word for word.

BGC Group comes closest to a third data point without producing one. Its energy, commodities and shipping revenues rose 5.3% to $275.5 million, “partially offset by lower oil and refined product volumes due to disruptions caused by the Strait of Hormuz closure.” The direction is stated. The size of the offset is not.

What this count is and is not

• It counts words, not exposure. A company can route every cargo through the strait and never print the phrase; another can print it out of caution while shipping nothing near the Gulf. The census measures disclosure language, and disclosure language is a choice.
• The two-company figure follows a stated rule. A filing counts only if the amount it gives is the impact. Fourteen filings were flagged by machine as candidates and read individually; twelve quantified the market, or their own segment without isolating the strait, or said the effect was immaterial. Core Laboratories reports segment revenue of $94.3 million and names the strait as one cause among several; that is not the same disclosure as Del Monte’s $2.3 million.
• The window is filings, not events. April to August 2026 covers reports on quarters ending roughly December through June. A closure that began on 28 February shows up unevenly across companies with different year-ends, and a company that filed in March sits outside the count.
• Silence is not concealment. No rule requires a company to size a geopolitical disruption, and many genuinely cannot separate it from freight inflation, tariffs and demand. The point is that when the requirement is absent, the answer arrives from two companies out of 225.
• Comparisons across years assume the index is stable. EDGAR full-text search covers 2001 onward, and the zero years are zeroes in that index rather than proof that no filer anywhere used the words.

Check it yourself

Every count in this article comes from one public query — the phrase, restricted to Form 10-Q, restricted by filing date — and the query is linked in the sources. Change the dates and the year series reproduces itself. The two quantified disclosures are single paragraphs in MD&A, and both are quoted above in the filings’ own words.

The method is the one we used to count 29 restructurings by their 8-K item number and to find the companies that told the SEC their own numbers could not be relied on — read the population, then count what is missing from it rather than what is in it. Full-text search is a blunt instrument and we have written before about how machine-readable SEC data can hand you the wrong document entirely, which is why every hit here was refolded by registrant and every quantified claim opened by hand. For the same reason, when a supply chain shows up in the numbers rather than in the risk factors, it tends to appear first in inventory.

No share prices appear in this article. The Brent figures are quoted from Seadrill’s quarterly report, not from a market data feed. Every calculation above is written out in this article’s front matter and re-checked when the site builds.

If a figure here does not match a filing, tell us and it will be corrected on the article and on the corrections log, with the date.