World's Largest Condom Maker Cites Iran Conflict as Reason for Up to 30% Price Hike

Malaysia’s Karex Bhd, the world’s largest manufacturer of condoms with an annual output exceeding five billion units and a client roster that includes Durex, Trojan and the British National Health Service, announced on Tuesday that it intends to increase its wholesale prices by between twenty and thirty percent, citing ongoing supply chain disruptions linked to the war in Iran as the primary catalyst for the adjustment. The company’s chief executive, Goh Miah Kiat, added that the price escalation may be further amplified should the wartime logistics bottlenecks and elevated freight charges persist, a scenario that appears increasingly likely given the recent surge in shipping delays and the concomitant depletion of inventory buffers among its major customers.

Concurrently, Karex reported a marked increase in demand for its products, a trend it attributes to higher freight costs and elongated transit times that have forced distributors and health providers to operate with unusually low stockpiles, thereby creating a market environment in which price adjustments are presented as a rational, if predictable, response to the artificially constrained supply landscape. Nevertheless, the decision to transfer the cost of geopolitical instability to end‑users raises questions about the resilience of global health procurement strategies, especially when a single supplier accounts for a substantial share of the worldwide condom supply and national health systems such as the NHS remain dependent on its pricing policies.

The episode underscores a broader systemic vulnerability in which essential public health commodities are subject to volatility generated by distant conflicts, highlighting the paradox that products designed to prevent disease transmission become themselves subject to transmission of financial risk across borders, a circumstance that appears to reward strategic opacity and limited diversification within the manufacturing sector. In the absence of coordinated international mechanisms to buffer such shocks, stakeholders are left to negotiate incremental price hikes that, while ostensibly justified by logistical realities, effectively expose consumers and health services to the collateral costs of wars in which they have no direct involvement.

Published: April 22, 2026