Israel’s war has not just hit Iran; it has put a surcharge on the boards, chips and gadgets its own tech economy needs as well as everyone else. Right, so Iran hit Saudi Arabia’s Jubail petrochemical complex on 7 April, after Iran’s own petrochemical plants at Asaluyeh, tied to the South Pars gas field, had already been hit in strikes from Israel. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards described Jubail as retaliation, so this was not Iran randomly waking up one morning and deciding to make laptops and the like more expensive for a laugh, though I’ll get onto that point in a moment. Jubail is part of the Gulf’s industrial plumbing, where Saudi petrochemicals, Western-linked supply chains, energy infrastructure and global manufacturing all meet, and that is why the consequences, the knock on effects of that strike has taken a few weeks to become clear. Production of a specialist resin used in printed circuit board laminates, PCB’s, has been disrupted, SABIC’s Jubail-linked supply has been put under pressure, and the price of those boards has jumped by as much as 40 per cent in a single month. So Israel’s war is no longer sitting neatly inside the nice little box marked missiles, oil tankers and military briefings. It has started crawling into the stuff under modern technology. Phones, laptops, servers, cars, consoles, routers, drones and medical devices still need circuit boards to work. Those boards need laminates. Those laminates need high-purity polyphenylene ether resin, which I know sounds like the sort of phrase designed to make normal people glaze over and go and do something healthier with their lives, but it matters because SABIC, the Saudi Basic Industries Corporation, operating at Jubail, is at the centre of a PCB supply chain reportedly accounting for around 70 per cent of global high-purity PPE supply used to make PCBs.