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Hormuz, the Cape and the Skills to Capture a Maritime Opportunity
The Strait of Hormuz is a long way from Cape Town. It is also a useful reminder of how quickly geography can become economically relevant again.
In the first half of 2025, about 20.9 million barrels of oil and petroleum liquids moved through Hormuz each day, roughly a quarter of global seaborne oil trade. The same US Energy Information Administration data estimates that 9.1 million barrels a day moved around the Cape of Good Hope over the same period, up from 6.1 million in 2022 - U.S. Energy Information Administration
Those are different routes serving different functions, and a disruption at Hormuz does not simply send everything around Cape Town. But the broader signal is worth paying attention to. Global trade remains heavily dependent on a small number of maritime passages, and disruption at any of them can change routes, costs and demand elsewhere.
We have already seen that happen closer to home. Red Sea disruption caused vessels to avoid the Suez route and sail around Africa instead. By mid-2024, UNCTAD recorded an 89% increase in ship capacity arriving around the Cape of Good Hope compared with late 2023 levels. The longer routes increased overall vessel demand by around 3% and container ship demand by around 12% - UNCTAD
There is an obvious geopolitical story here, but I think there is a more useful South African one. What exactly are we capable of doing with all this maritime activity?
The visualisation by Preamble above makes the question unusually tangible. Ships stream around southern Africa, some entering our ports and many simply continuing on. Seen like this, the Cape’s location looks extraordinary.
But geography is only the starting point.
The more interesting fact is that a maritime economy already exists underneath those shipping lanes.
This is not a new industry
Cape Town exists in its present form partly because of maritime trade. Long before permanent European settlement, Khoekhoe communities traded with passing ships in Table Bay. The VOC established its refreshment station at the Cape in 1652 because of its position on the route between Europe and Asia, and the settlement subsequently developed as a global trading port. Cape Town City
The same maritime logic shaped Simon’s Town. Simon’s Bay was identified as a safer winter anchorage in the late seventeenth century, VOC ships were directed there during the winter months from 1741, and the British established a Royal Navy base there in 1814. The base was transferred to the South African Navy in 1957. Resource Cape Town
The industry has changed radically since then, but the accumulation of capability has continued. Today, Cape Town has ship-repair facilities, marine engineering businesses, logistics infrastructure and an export-oriented boatbuilding sector. Saldanha Bay adds deep-water port and industrial capacity. Simon’s Town remains an important naval and technical centre.
The Western Cape Government estimates that the provincial boatbuilding industry grew from R2.3 billion in 2020 to R4.6 billion in 2024. The City of Cape Town reports that R4.3 billion worth of Cape Town-made ships, boats and floating structures were ordered by foreign buyers in 2024, with yachts and pleasure vessels accounting for the overwhelming majority of those exports.
The province also accounts for around 80% of South Africa’s ship-repair activity, according to Western Cape Government investment data.
And demand is not purely theoretical. In June this year, Transnet officials told an Oceans Economy conference that some Cape Town ship-repair facilities were already fully booked through the end of 2027, prompting plans for additional floating-dock capacity.
So the first conclusion is fairly straightforward: we are not looking for a maritime industry to create. We are looking at an existing one and asking how much further it can go.
The Saldanha–Cape Town–Simon’s Town axis
It may help to stop looking at these places individually.
Saldanha Bay, Cape Town and Simon’s Town are not interchangeable. Nor do they currently function as a single integrated maritime cluster. But they occupy one coastline and hold complementary capabilities.
Saldanha brings deep-water infrastructure, industrial land and a platform for marine fabrication and offshore servicing. Cape Town has the densest commercial ecosystem, with boatbuilding, ship repair, port logistics and supporting services. Simon’s Town brings naval maintenance, dockyard infrastructure and specialist engineering capability.
Taken together, they look less like three separate maritime locations and more like a potential Cape maritime capability corridor.
The value of that framing is not the map itself. It is what happens when we begin asking questions across the whole axis.
Where do the specialist trades sit? Which businesses are growing? Where are the common workforce constraints? Which capabilities are concentrated in one institution or a handful of experienced people? Where does one part of the industry compete with another for the same electricians, welders, fitters, riggers or technicians?
And perhaps most importantly: do we have enough skill to sustain the economy that is already here, before we start talking about capturing more?
We do not yet know the answer
There are enough warning signs to take the question seriously.
The City of Cape Town explicitly identified skills shortages as one of the development bottlenecks facing boatbuilding in 2025.
Saldanha Bay Municipality is currently undertaking a skills supply-and-demand assessment aimed at identifying workforce capability gaps, skills mismatches and the alignment between training and labour-market needs. Small Business Ministry
Simon’s Town presents another dimension of the same problem. Parliament’s assessment of the Armscor Dockyard records identified gaps in skills, technology, processes and systems. The Department of Defence subsequently reported that a lack of repair capacity at the Dockyard contributed to the unavailability of naval vessels during 2024/25.
There is also historical evidence that maritime demand can run ahead of labour supply. Operation Phakisa’s marine manufacturing work recorded that when Cape Town, Saldanha Bay and Ngqura were simultaneously busy with rig-repair work, South Africa did not have enough skilled labour to meet demand and foreign workers had to be brought in. The same work highlighted an ageing artisan workforce and weaknesses in mentorship and workplace skills development. Operation Phakisa
That evidence is more than a decade old, so it should not be used to describe the current workforce as though nothing has changed.
But it raises a question that has never really gone away. How much surge capacity does the Cape maritime economy actually have?
Which brings us back to Hormuz
Hormuz should not become the business case for maritime development in the Cape.
Neither should Suez.
The industry is already substantial enough to justify attention on its own.
But these chokepoints tell us something about the world in which that industry is operating. Shipping routes that once looked fixed can change quickly. Red Sea disruption has already demonstrated that the Cape can become significantly busier when another route comes under pressure. UNCTAD notes that the rerouting around southern Africa has extended journey times, increased demand for vessels and placed additional pressure on ports and services.
A broader way of thinking about the future of work
There is another reason this is interesting.
If your children are asking what they should study, our instinct is usually to point towards the sectors attracting the most attention at that moment. Increasingly that means AI, software, data, renewable energy or some variation of the digital economy.
All of those are legitimate areas of opportunity. Maritime itself is becoming more digital, automated, connected and data-intensive.
But the larger lesson is that the future of work requires a broader orientation.
It is shaped not only by emerging technologies, but by the systems becoming more economically and strategically important around them.
Trade is one of those systems.
Energy is another.
Logistics, infrastructure, manufacturing and maritime capability sit alongside them.
The interesting careers of the next twenty years may therefore appear in combinations that do not fit neatly into the categories we currently use. Marine engineering will increasingly involve digital systems. Advanced boatbuilding already depends on sophisticated materials and manufacturing technologies. Ports are becoming data environments. Maintenance increasingly intersects with sensors, automation and predictive systems.
The signal is not that young people should abandon digital skills and become welders.
It is that we should become better at reading where economic systems are moving and then understanding the combinations of skill those systems will require.
The Cape’s maritime economy is a useful example because the demand is not imaginary. The infrastructure exists. The firms exist. The exports exist. The ships are visible offshore.
What is less visible is whether the human capability underneath that economy is deep enough for what comes next.
The question worth answering
I think that is where a more useful blue economy conversation begins.
Not with another list of hypothetical jobs.
And not with a claim that geopolitical instability will somehow deliver growth to our coastline.
We should start with the industrial base we already have across Saldanha Bay, Cape Town and Simon’s Town, establish where its real capabilities sit, identify where they are thinning or constrained, and build the skills architecture around demonstrable economic demand.
If that work shows that we already have sufficient skills, we will know where the capacity exists to expand.
If it shows gaps, we can stop training broadly and start investing specifically.
And if greater global volatility does increase maritime activity around the Cape over time, we will be better placed to convert some of that movement into South African industrial value.
Hormuz may be thousands of kilometres away.
The strategic question it raises is much closer to home: do we understand the economy sitting on our own coastline well enough to build for its next phase?
The shipping visualisation accompanying this article was produced by Preamble (@preamblehqdotcom). Preamble notes that the vessel movements shown are modelled shipping-lane patterns rather than recorded AIS tracks. The visual nevertheless provides a striking representation of the scale and geography of maritime traffic around southern Africa.
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