Suez revenue climbs 13% in the second quarter while container traffic stays down four-fifths
CAPMAS data show $1.26bn in Q2 receipts and 3,580 transits, of which 1,526 were tankers. The recovery is in crude reroutings, not in the return of the box lines.
Egypt’s statistics agency CAPMAS put Suez Canal revenue at $1.26bn in the second quarter of 2026, up 13% from $1.12bn in the first — the highest quarterly figure since the first quarter of 2024, according to Financial Afrik. Rio Times carries the breakdown the other outlets do not: transits up 7.7% quarter-on-quarter to 3,580 vessels, net tonnage up 18.3%, monthly receipts rising through the quarter to $446m in June, and tankers accounting for 1,526 of the 3,580 transits. Volumes remain at roughly half pre-crisis levels and container traffic is still down around four-fifths. The pound-denominated series CAPMAS supplied to Al-Dostour shows first-half 2026 revenue of EGP 122.5bn against EGP 94.7bn a year earlier, a rise of EGP 27.8bn or 29.3%, and monthly net tonnage climbing from 45.7mn tonnes in January to 56.9mn in June.
Admiral Osama Rabie, chairman and managing director of the Suez Canal Authority, said in late June that revenue for fiscal year 2025/26 reached $4.67bn, up 23% year-on-year, with vessel numbers up 10% and tonnage up 22%. Central Bank figures for the first nine months of that year, July 2025 to March 2026, show Suez transit receipts up 22.1% to $3.2bn from $2.6bn, against an overall balance-of-payments deficit of $1.8bn compared with $1.9bn a year earlier. Both the Rabie statement and the CBE series reach this desk through the aggregator capmad.com; the primary documents were not opened.
Assessment: Read the composition, not the headline. A canal earning more while carrying half its old volume and a fifth of its old container traffic is being paid by tankers taking the long way round a closed Hormuz — Rio Times' causal reading, but one the tanker-to-box split in the same dataset supports without needing it. That makes the revenue rebound a hedge against the same war that threatens the current account, which is a fragile thing to build a budget on. Two cautions: the 29.3% pound growth flatters the dollar recovery, and the two currencies should never be shown side by side without that said.