There is a familiar script we’re privy to that whenever oil price rise: fuel gets expensive, airlines suffer, freight costs climb, food follows and consumers eventually pay more. However, the more interesting story in 2026 is not simply the price of oil. It’s the price of dependence.
The Strait of Hormuz carries roughly a quarter of global seaborne oil trade, along with significant volumes of LNG and fertilizer. When that route was disrupted this year, the shock travelled well beyond petrol stations into shipping, fertilizer, insurance, aviation and food. UNCTAD has warned that the disruption can affect everything from freight rates to global food security.
Oil has always been more than a fuel. It has been the world’s cheapest way of buying distance. That matters to almost every business Kings Global operates around: aviation, apparel, food & hospitality, B2B, media, publishing, and demand generation – albeit in very different ways.
Take aviation; IATA expects fuel to represent about 31% of airline operating costs in 2026, with jet fuel prices dramatically higher than last year. The obvious response is higher fares. The less obvious one is behavioral: fewer trips, shorter trips, more scrutiny of business travel and greater pressure to make every seat profitable.
Our apparel business presents almost the opposite picture. Most of our fashion and apparel is made and sold in India, so a disruption halfway around the world does not suddenly make a garment more expensive to ship to our customer. That is an important distinction in a globalized industry. However, it doesn’t make the business immune to oil.
Petrochemicals sit inside synthetic fibers. Diesel moves raw materials and finished good across India. Packaging, warehousing, and electricity carry energy costs, and if fuel and food become more expensive, the consumer has a less discretionary income left for a new shirt. The exposure, in other words, is less about distance and more about the cost structure surrounding it.
There is an upside to that domestic model too. A supply chain that begins and ends largely in one country has fewer international freight legs, less exposure to global shopping disruption and, potentially, greater ability to react to local demand. That is not just a fashion lesson. It is a useful lesson in resilience.
Food is even more deeply tied to energy. Oil enters the food chain through fertilizer, farming, refrigeration, processing, packaging, and transport. The World Bank recorded a 46% jump in urea prices between February and March 2026. A restaurant does not need to buy oil directly for an oil shock to eventually appear on its menu prices.
B2B is more subtle. Your business may not consume much energy, your consumer might. A manufacturer facing higher freight and electricity costs may postpone software investment. A retailer may slow expansion or a distributor may carry less inventory. The oil price may never appear on your P&L. It can still appear in your customer’s buying decision.
That has an interesting implication for media, publishing, and lead generation. When margins tighten, marketing tends to become more accountable. “Reach” is asked to explain itself. Customer acquisition cost, conversion, and qualified leads become harder numbers to ignore.
For demand generation businesses, that can create an opportunity: uncertainty tends to increase the value of measurable growth. Meanwhile, the world is quietly building alternatives.
Global electric-car sales reached about 21 million in 2025, while EVs displaced roughly 1.2 million barrels of oil demand every day, according to the IEA. The IEA also expects around 4,600 GW of new renewable capacity between 2025 and 2030. The transition is often presented as a climate story. There is another explanation that businesses may find more persuasive: predictability.
Solar can reduce exposure to volatile electricity process. Electric fleets can reduce diesel dependence. Local manufacturing can reduce international freight exposure. Better forecasting can reduce inventory and the transportation required to move it. Businesses don’t necessarily have to become environmentalists. They just dislike volatility, and that may be what eventually changes the energy system.
Oil is not disappearing. The IEA and OPEC don’t even agree on what happens to oil demand next, with the IEA forecasting a significant decline while OPEC still expects growth. But something more subtle is happening.
Companies are gradually learning to operate with less dependence on a single energy source, a single geography and a single supply chain.
At Kings Global, the contrast is particularly visible because our businesses sit across such different parts of the economy. An airline feels oil almost immediately. An Indian-made apparel business feels it through its inputs and consumer. A restaurant feels it through food and operating costs. A B2B business can feel it through a customer’s capex decision. A lead-generation business can benefit when companies demand greater accountability from marketing.
Same oil price, but very different consequences. Which brings us to question I find more useful than predicting the next move in Brent: How much of your business depends on the world remaining cheap, predictable, and easy to move though? Because that dependency and not the price of a barrel itself may be the real cost of oil.
For us, this is not simply an oil story, it is a story about how our customers will behave when the cost of doing business changes. In aviation, it means protecting margins when fuel becomes more expensive. In apparel, our largely domestic production gives us some insulation from global freight disruption, while leaving us exposed to petrochemical inputs and changes in consumer spending. In food and hospitality, procurement and menu economics become more important. And across our B2B, media and lead generation businesses, the premium on measurable returns is likely to rise as companies become more careful about where they put their money.
This is perhaps the most useful lesson for us at Kings Global: resilience is no longer just about surviving a shock, it is about having a business model that can adapt when the assumptions underneath your industry change. Oil may become cheaper again or it may stay expensive. Nobody knows with certainty, but the businesses that matter to us will have to operate in both worlds.
This is why the real question isn’t where oil goes next. It is about how much our industries have already learned to live without depending on it.
