Suez earned $505m in July, its best month since December 2023 and barely half the 2023 peak

Suez Canal revenue reached $505 million in July 2026, the highest monthly figure since December 2023, according to the state statistics agency CAPMAS, reported by Transport Topics on Bloomberg data and put at a 42% year-on-year gain by the Arabic outlets Egyin and Cairo Mubasher. CEIC’s series, sourced to the Suez Canal Authority, records $505.5m for July against $438.1m in June. That series runs monthly from January 1990, 439 observations, with a median of $448.9m, an all-time high of $948.0m in May 2023 and a record low of $113.8m in June 1990. Quarterly revenue was $1.26bn in Q2 2026, up 13% on roughly $1.1bn in Q1 and the best quarter since Q1 2024, per Financial Afrik. The canal’s record year was 2023, at $10.2bn; traffic collapsed in early 2024 when Houthi attacks closed the southern Red Sea to most operators.

SCA chairman Lt. Gen. Osama Rabie, speaking on the programme Al-Soura on 4 September, said the Authority expects calendar-2026 revenue of $5.8bn to $6bn against $4.1bn in 2025, and claimed a 40% rise in transiting ships and a 50% rise in dollar revenue across the second half of 2026, crediting the return of Maersk, Hapag-Lloyd and CMA CGM. He attributed the turn to trade rerouted by the Hormuz crisis. One Cairo outlet, Egypt Telegraph, rendered the same appearance as a $6bn figure already achieved in fiscal year 2026/27 — arithmetically impossible against a $505m July in a year that began in July, and almost certainly a transcription of a forecast into a result. Transport Topics attributes the Hormuz mechanism to unnamed “analysts.” No vessel-class or cargo-type breakdown demonstrating the substitution has been published.

The canal is one of a small set of hard-currency lines Cairo can point to. Central Bank of Egypt data put net international reserves at $56,293.9m at end-July 2026, after a $3.6bn rise across the first half of the year to what was then a record $55.1bn. The IMF Executive Board completed the seventh review under the 48-month Extended Fund Facility and the second under the Resilience and Sustainability Facility on 30 July, releasing about $1.8bn, and recorded real GDP growth of 5 percent in the third quarter of FY2025/26 and 5.2 percent across the first nine months. The Fund said the economy “has remained resilient to spillovers from the war in the Middle East,” then attached the condition: “decisive implementation of the state ownership policy and divestment agenda will be essential.” Five months earlier, in the fifth and sixth reviews, it called that agenda “stalled.”

Assessment: Treat the canal number as real and the explanation as unproven. The revenue is audited state data; the Hormuz-substitution story is asserted by the man whose performance it flatters and repeated through anonymous analysts. The more useful frame is the long series: a best-month-in-33 headline that still lands near a 36-year median and at roughly half the May 2023 high is a recovery and a permanent-looking shortfall drawn on the same line. And note what the IMF language has not changed into over six months. “Stalled” became “essential”; neither sentence says anything was sold. The divestment agenda is where the armed forces' holdings sit, unnamed. That, not the canal, is the binding constraint on the external position.