Suez posts its strongest week since early 2024 as Red Sea risk reappears unverified
Lloyd’s List Intelligence recorded canal traffic elevated for a second consecutive week on 3 September. Reports of renewed missile activity circulating on 8–9 September have not been confirmed by any wire.
Lloyd’s List Intelligence’s Red Sea Brief of 3 September 2026 reports Suez Canal traffic elevated for a second consecutive week, with weekly transits at levels not seen since the start of 2024 — that is, since before the mass diversion of shipping around the Cape. The same brief flags disruption at Bab el-Mandeb. The tracker is paywalled and the underlying weekly transit count is not public. Egyptian official figures point the same way: the Suez Canal Authority chairman, Ossama Rabie, told Sada al-Balad on 28 June that FY2025/26 revenue reached USD 4.67bn (EGP 230.22bn), up 23% year on year. For 1 January to 8 February 2026 the authority counted 1,315 vessels and USD 449m, against 1,243 vessels and USD 368m a year earlier.
The recovery is uneven. Container transits ran at 150 in January 2026 in both directions, down 16.7% year on year and the weakest January in a decade, according to aggregated traffic data whose provenance is worth checking. Against that, Rabie told an IMF mission in December that the authority projects about USD 8bn in FY2026/27 and potentially USD 10bn the year after — a forecast delivered to a creditor, and best read as a negotiating number. What could undo all of it is unverified: Arabic-language aggregators carried items on 8–9 September describing a Houthi strike on Saudi cities and Jordanian interceptions of ballistic missiles. Neither claim has wire confirmation.
Assessment: The Files is publishing the shipping recovery and withholding the escalation, deliberately. Low-grade aggregators are the fastest carriers of both true and invented war news, and a claim of missiles over Jordan is precisely the item that moves freight rates before anyone checks it. What is worth holding in mind is the asymmetry: Cairo’s canal revenue recovers slowly, over quarters of gradual carrier returns, and can be destroyed in a single week. That is why the SCA’s $8bn projection should be treated as an ask rather than a plan, and why the reserve position in today’s lead story — flattered by gold, thinner in dollars — has less shock absorption than the headline implies.