Nearly four months since the United States and Israel first launched strikes on Iran, sending energy prices soaring and disrupting global trade, the two sides are holding talks in Switzerland with a memorandum of understanding in place establishing a 60-day ceasefire and framework for negotiations on Iran’s nuclear programme, sanctions relief and the future of the Strait of Hormuz.

A lasting deal could ease the economic pain felt by businesses and consumers worldwide. But, for some companies, the conflict has proven immensely profitable.

Defence contractors, oil and gas producers and investment banks are among the sectors that have seen profits soar as war and uncertainty have upended global markets.

So, who exactly has profited the most?

Energy firms

In terms of hard, cold dollars, no one sector has benefitted more directly from the war than energy. Before the war, about one-fifth of the world’s oil and liquified natural gas (LNG) passed through the Strait of Hormuz.

Disruptions to shipping through the narrow waterway sent crude prices soaring and triggered sharp swings in global energy markets.

At one point, Brent crude briefly touched $126 a barrel, its highest price in four years. The price has since dropped to pre-war levels of about $72 per barrel.

Higher prices translated into a massive cash flow windfall for some oil producers who were also able to benefit from larger price gaps between regional energy markets.

Saudi Aramco’s first-quarter profits rose by 25 percent to $32.5bn compared with the same period a year earlier. The firm leveraged its 1,200km East-West pipeline to the Red Sea, bypassing the Strait of Hormuz, to maintain exports at a capacity of seven million barrels per day, while selling oil at higher prices.

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British Petroleum (BP) reported first-quarter profits of $3.2bn – more than double the previous year and roundly beating analyst expectations of $2.67bn.

Following regional strikes on Qatar’s Ras Laffan facility, Shell’s co-owned Pearl GTL – a gas-to-liquids plant converting raw natural gas into liquid fuels – saw its Train 2 processing unit sustain severe damage. Shell estimated repairs will take a year to complete. Despite this, the group maintained a strong balance sheet, reporting profits of $6.9bn compared with about $5.6bn in the previous year’s first quarter.

Despite seeing 15 percent of its global production shut down across Qatar, Iraq and the United Arab Emirates, TotalEnergies reported adjusted net income of $5.4bn compared with $4.2bn in the same quarter a year prior. It maintained 210,000 barrels per day of onshore UAE production by routing exports through the Fujairah Terminal, bypassing the Strait of Hormuz.

Rystad Energy, an independent energy research firm, analysed the cash flow of major oil companies in April, at the height of market volatility, comparing returns at under $65 per barrel pre-war against $100 per barrel during the war, and found that Saudi Aramco stood to gain the most from higher prices.

Thomas Liles, senior vice president of Upstream Research at Rystad Energy, told Al Jazeera: “Each one of those players is going to end up in a net positive place if we see higher prices persist throughout the year. It’s really just a question of how much of that cash flow they end up capturing.”

The beneficiaries extend beyond oil majors. With about one-fifth of global LNG supplies normally being shipped through the Strait of Hormuz, US LNG firms such as Venture Global and Cheniere Energy are well positioned to gain as buyers seek more secure supplies.

“I would say probably most companies without a very concentrated Middle East or, let’s say, west of Hormuz exposure stand to benefit. Some of that is going to include US shale oil players, Canadian oil sands players, the IOCs [International Oil Companies], producers in Latin America, LNG players like Venture Global who sell more into the spot market, so there are a number of winners here for different reasons,” Liles told Al Jazeera.

But analysts caution the windfall may be short-lived – a tentative US-Iran ceasefire has already pushed prices lower, and prolonged high energy costs risk weakening demand and tipping economies towards recession.

Defence contractors

Within days of the first US-Israel strikes on Iran at the end of February, the heads of the world’s largest arms manufacturers met at the White House and agreed to ramp up weapons production as US munitions stockpiles dwindled.

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Executives from RTX, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, BAE Systems, L3Harris and Honeywell attended the talks. All are sitting on billions of dollars in orders, backlogs that are likely to grow as governments rush to replenish their arsenals.

Only weeks before the conflict, US President Donald Trump approved a $500bn increase in defence funding sought by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. On March 19, Hegseth defended a further request of $200bn in additional funding from Congress by telling reporters, “It takes money to kill bad guys.”

Investors have already begun betting on a prolonged boom. The strongest performances came from Boeing, RTX, L3Harris and Northrop Grumman, all of which reported solid revenue growth and either raised or reaffirmed their full-year guidance.

Boeing’s revenue climbed 14 percent to $22.2bn in the first three months of the year from higher aircraft deliveries. Though the company remained loss-making, it significantly narrowed its net loss to $7m from $31m in the same period a year earlier. Meanwhile, Northrop Grumman’s orders backlog hit a record $95.6bn, boosted by the addition of classified programmes and F-35-related work.

The war is reinforcing an already lucrative model, experts say. US defence contracts account for a substantial share of revenues for munitions producers. Between 2020 and 2024, private firms received $2.4 trillion in Pentagon contracts – more than half of the department’s discretionary spending, according to the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and the Costs of War project at Brown University’s Watson School of International and Public Affairs, published last year. One-third ($771bn) of those contracts went to just five companies: Lockheed Martin, RTX, Boeing, General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman.

Freight and insurance companies

The disruption has created longer voyages and shipping bottlenecks have in effect removed almost 7 percent of the global tanker fleet from circulation, according to European financial services firm Kepler Cheuvreux, sending freight rates – the cost of shipping cargo – to historic highs.

Rates on the benchmark Middle East Gulf to East Asia route, a direct measure of disruption in the Strait of Hormuz, jumped from about 100 Worldscale points before the conflict to more than 500. Worldscale is an index used to price tanker freight rates, where 100 represents a standard baseline rate for a given route. For a very large crude carrier (VLCC) hauling 260,000 tonnes of oil, that translates into millions of dollars per trip.

The main beneficiaries have been specialist tanker operators such as Frontline and DHT Holdings, whose earnings rise directly with freight rates. Frontline, the world’s fifth-largest oil tanker shipping company, reported revenues of more than $536m in the first quarter, while DHT secured charter rates of more than $100,000 a day for some of its vessels.

The conflict has also been profitable for marine insurers.

Within days of the outbreak of hostilities, war-risk premiums for vessels transiting the Strait of Hormuz surged fivefold. Insurance costs that previously stood at about 0.25 percent of a ship’s value climbed to 1.5 percent and, in some cases, as high as 10 percent. Leading insurers, including Gard, Skuld and NorthStandard, have increased premiums for Gulf transits from a baseline of 0.15-0.25 percent of vessel value to as high as 1.5 percent.

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For a tanker worth $100m, a single voyage through the Gulf could cost in the region of $1.5m to insure.

War-risk insurance is mandatory for vessels operating in conflict zones and insurers have been able to rapidly reprice policies as the Gulf’s risk profile deteriorated. Analysts say demand for standalone war-risk cover is likely to remain elevated long after the fighting ends as shipowners and cargo operators reassess the risks of operating in the region.

Constantin Gurdgiev, professor of finance at Monfort College of Business, University of Northern Colorado, says insurers face three competing forces: the ability to rapidly reprice policies and pass on risks to customers, growing exposure from vessels already insured and stranded in conflict zones, and a lasting shift in the Gulf’s risk profile that is likely to keep demand for war-risk cover elevated long after the fighting ends.

“As long as we are not seeing a dramatic increase in losses sustained by civilian vessels, the second effect will be dominated by the first and the third effects, driving up short and medium-term profitability of the war insurers.” Gurdgiev told Al Jazeera: “However, if ongoing hostilities accelerate and spread more to the civilian infrastructure, the second effect can drive substantial losses to the insurance companies.”

Wall Street banks

The war has also been good for Wall Street.

The conflict triggered sharp swings in oil, currencies and bond markets, prompting investors to rapidly reposition their portfolios and driving a surge in trading activity. For the biggest US banks, volatility translated into higher fees and stronger trading revenues.

The six largest US investment banks – JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo – collectively earned nearly $48bn in profits in the first three months of 2026.

JPMorgan, the largest US bank, reported a 13 percent increase in profits, with a net income of $16.5bn, compared with $14.6bn in the same period a year prior. Bank of America made $8.6bn compared with about $7.4bn, while Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo each generated more than $5bn in quarterly profits compared with profits between $4.1 to $4.9bn in the same period a year earlier.

The biggest gains came from trading desks specialising in fixed income, currencies and commodities (FICC).

Prediction market punters

The conflict has generated scrutiny over a pattern of suspiciously timed trades on prediction market platforms Polymarket and Kalshi – online exchanges where speculators place wagers on the outcome of real-world events.

On March 23, $580m in oil futures flooded the market, resulting in a sudden spike in volume – nine times the normal – roughly 16 minutes before Trump announced a pause in strikes on Iranian power plants.

Now, Polymarket, the market prediction platform, is at the centre of a growing insider trading scandal entangled with conflicts of interest involving the Trump family.

In April, at least 50 newly created accounts collectively made hundreds of thousands of dollars betting on a US-Iran ceasefire in the moments before Trump announced it on social media.

A Yale University analysis of trading patterns found that suspicious accounts were winning nearly 70 percent of their bets across more than 200,000 flagged cases – a hit rate so far above what random chance would predict that researchers say it is statistically almost impossible to occur without some form of prior knowledge. Estimated profits from these trades reached $143m.

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