Suez revenue is recovering, but not fast enough to reach the $8bn Rabie promised the IMF
Four quarters at the second quarter’s pace lands around $5bn. The Suez Canal Authority’s own projection for FY2026/27 is eight.
Canal revenue reached $1.26bn in the second quarter of 2026, up 13 percent on the roughly $1.12bn recorded in the first quarter and the highest quarterly figure since the first quarter of 2024, according to CAPMAS data reported by Financial Afrik. Egyptian Streets put FY2025/26 revenue up 23 percent year on year. The monthly series is flatter than the quarterly framing suggests: CEIC, drawing on Suez Canal Authority data, records $419.0m in May 2026 against $419.6m in April, in a series whose long-run monthly average since 1990 is $416.9m. Set that against the target. Osama Rabie, the SCA chairman, told an IMF mission in December 2025 — in remarks carried by the State Information Service — that the authority projected roughly $8bn for FY2026/27 and potentially $10bn for FY2027/28, citing 5,874 vessels carrying 247.2 million tons since that July.
The two numbers do not meet. Annualising the second-quarter run-rate produces something close to $5bn, not $8bn, and the monthly prints show a plateau rather than a climb. Rabie said on 18 January that revenues should improve further in the second half of 2026 as some lines return to normal operating levels by year-end, and referenced cumulative losses of nearly $7bn, according to Ahram Online. Sisi, in the same month, put those losses at approximately $9 billion over two years, in remarks carried by Yeni Şafak’s English service. Nobody has publicly reconciled the two figures for what appears to be the same shortfall. No new SCA release surfaced in the 31 August–2 September window; the August monthly figure is the next test.
Assessment: Rabie’s $8bn was stated to an IMF mission, which tells you what it is for: a projection that supports a fiscal path, not a forecast anyone is holding him to. The plateau in the monthly series matters more than the quarterly uptick, because it suggests carriers have settled at a partial return rather than resumed a rebuild. The $9bn-versus-$7bn gap is the tell — when a head of state and an agency chairman describe the same loss differently, at least one figure is doing political work. It also bears directly on the Xi file: Suez Canal Economic Zone commitments are priced off traffic that has not fully come back.