Nina Østergaard has taken on the role of chairman of Bunker Holding's board. Image Credit: Bunker Holding

While no-one has complained of prices being too stable over the past three months as the Iran war upended markets, for Bunker Holding this was a substantial problem in the past financial year.

The marine fuels group reported 2025/26 pre-tax earnings of $73 million this week, up by 59% from the same period a year earlier, but 36.1% lower than its average over the past five years.

Those profits will undoubtedly have been boosted by the surge in prices and margins driven by the Iran war in March and April at the end of its financial year.

But Nina Østergaard, the new chairman of Bunker Holding as well as owner of its parent company, USTC, has suggested the torpid state of the market in the preceding 10 months was a significant problem.

"An unusually stable oil price was one of the defining conditions of the year," she said in a LinkedIn post commenting on the results.

"In a business shaped by trading patterns, timing, and market movement, that means fewer opportunities to work with. It also puts more pressure on commercial execution."

Ship & Bunker's G20-VLSFO Index of prices at 20 leading bunkering locations saw an average daily change of 0.96% in the year to April 30, the period covered by Bunker Holding's 2025/26 financial year. This was the highest daily volatility for the 12 months to the end of April since 2022/23.

But stripping out March and April's abnormal volatility because of the situation in the Middle East, in the ten months to February 28 the index saw an average daily change of just 0.53%, the least since VLSFO started trading in 2019.

Before the start of the war, the conversation at IE Week events in London in February focused on low volatility and increased competition from smaller traders leading to dramatically lower margins.

With the Iran war now appearing to be drawing to a close, the big question for the bunker market will be whether those pre-war trading conditions now reemerge.