The EU and UN have tightened sanctions on Iran considerably this year, and it's a development we've had to sit down and properly understand rather than treat as background noise. Iran is one of the markets in our export footprint, and new restrictions of this scale change what can move, how it can be paid for, and which banking channels are even usable for a transaction to go through cleanly.
The practical challenge for an exporter our size is less about the politics and more about the paperwork and the payment mechanics. Letters of credit that used to route through certain banks may no longer be viable. Compliance checks that used to be a formality now require real diligence, because the cost of getting a restricted transaction wrong is far higher than the cost of a shipping delay. We've had to get more careful, more deliberate, and frankly slower on anything touching this particular market.
We don't have a neat conclusion to offer here, because the sanctions landscape itself doesn't feel settled — it feels like something that could tighten further or ease in the years ahead. What we can say is that staying current on exactly what's permitted, rather than assuming last year's rules still apply, has become a permanent part of how we plan any shipment into this market.
