Chokepoint
Taiwan Strait
The South China Sea to the East China Sea
The Taiwan Strait separates Taiwan from mainland China and is roughly 130 kilometres across at its narrowest. It carries a large share of container traffic between North Asia and the rest of the world, and the surrounding region manufactures a substantial proportion of the world's semiconductors. Its significance to supply chains is therefore twofold: the water itself, and what is made beside it.
What passes through it
- Container services between North Asian ports and Europe, the Middle East and South East Asia
- Energy imports serving Taiwan, Japan and South Korea
- High-value electronics and semiconductor shipments, usually by air but dependent on regional stability
Typical disruption
- Military exercises with declared exclusion zones
- Airspace and sea-space restrictions affecting routing
- Port operations at Kaohsiung and other Taiwanese ports being suspended or slowed
- Insurance and charter markets repricing the region
The alternative, and what it costs
Routing east of Taiwan through the Philippine Sea, which typically adds one to two days of sailing. The larger effect is usually not the extra distance but the knock-on congestion when many vessels reroute or wait at once.
What this means for your suppliers
The supply-chain risk concentrates in electronics. If a component is single-sourced from the region, the exposure is far more serious than the sailing delay suggests, because there is no second supplier to switch to at short notice.
Qualification of an alternative source takes months. That is why the useful act-by date for this chokepoint is usually measured in weeks before stock runs down, not days.
For non-electronics cargo, treat this as a routing and congestion question with a modest time cost.
Other chokepoints
The rest of the map
See it against your own lanes
We load a sample of your suppliers, run a live scenario, and show which orders would slip.