This primer from aurelionresearch.substa… is one of the most thorough breakdowns of the fertilizer supply chain I've seen — and it reinforces a thesis I published earlier today in quantumpointpartners.su….

The headline risk everyone's watching is nitrogen. Urea. Hormuz carries 49% of global seaborne urea exports and US Gulf granular urea has surged past $800/t. CF Industries has already priced a lot of that in.

But Aurelion flags the part most people are missing: phosphate.

The connection isn't obvious at first glance — the Middle East doesn't dominate phosphate rock trade directly. The chokepoint is upstream: sulphur. Sulphuric acid is the critical reagent for converting phosphate rock into DAP and MAP fertilizer. Roughly half of China's 9.6 million tonnes of annual sulphur imports originate from the Persian Gulf. When Hormuz closes, it doesn't just block urea shipments — it starves the global phosphate processing chain of the chemistry it needs to function.

The downstream consequences are already cascading. India has capped domestic natural gas supply to fertilizer producers at 70–75% of normal, costing an estimated 800,000 tonnes per month of urea production. China is unlikely to export nitrogen or phosphate in the near term as it deals with its own sulphur and energy constraints. And Brazil — the world's largest soybean exporter — typically sources 25–30% of its phosphate needs from China and half its urea from the Middle East. Both pipelines are now constrained heading into the 2026–27 soybean purchasing campaign.

This is where the seasonal calendar matters. In my piece today, I laid out the case for why Mosaic (MOS) is the late-cycle phosphate play that the nitrogen-focused consensus is overlooking:

• Nitrogen is an early-season nutrient — vegetative growth, corn planting, March through May. That trade (CF Industries, +18% from March) has largely played out.

• Phosphorus is a late-season nutrient — root development, flowering, grain fill, with demand peaking June through August and again in the September–November post-harvest application window.

• MOS at $22.51 trades at 0.61x book, 6.42x EV/EBITDA, and yields 4.89% with a 48% payout ratio near its 52-week low. The market is pricing in a world where Hormuz is open and phosphate flows freely. That's not the world we live in.

Even with Trump announcing tonight that a deal has been "largely negotiated" — the key word is gradually on Hormuz reopening. Supply normalization takes months: insurance repricing, ship repositioning, mine restarts, port backlog clearing. That timeline runs directly into the phosphate application season.

Same strait. Different nutrient. Different season. Same thesis.

Read the full Aurelion primer aurelionresearch.substa… — and my full scorecard and forward thesis quantumpointpartners.su….

— Alex Trostorff, Quantum Point Partners