Suez revenue jumps 42% as a broken tanker market reroutes ships through Egypt

Bloomberg reported on 8 September that Suez Canal revenue rose 42% in July against the same month of 2025, attributing the increase to the Iran war’s effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz and to continuing Houthi threats in the southern Red Sea pushing tonnage back onto the Egyptian route. CAPMAS data put July transits at 1,340 vessels, 27% above July 2025 — an implied base of roughly 1,055 — and up from 1,208 in June. Suez Canal Authority chairman Osama Rabie told a local television talkshow in the week before the Bloomberg piece that the Authority expects full-year 2026 revenue of $5.8bn to $6.0bn, against $4.1bn in 2025. That is Rabie’s own figure, given on air rather than in a published Authority document, and it is an increase of 40% to 46%.

Bloomberg kept the caveat that Cairo’s own messaging tends to drop: both crossings and revenue remain far below pre-Gaza-war levels. The canal took a record $10.2bn in 2023; even the top of Rabie’s forecast is 41% below that. The mechanism behind the uplift is also less flattering than a return of confidence. Lloyd’s List Intelligence’s Red Sea Brief of 3 September describes Red Sea disruption degrading VLCC efficiency, with Yanbu cargoes increasingly routed north via Suez — partial loading at Yanbu, topping up at Sidi Kerir — alongside greater use of Hormuz shuttle tankers and repeated ship-to-ship transfers. Separately, the independent Egyptian outlet Al Manassa reported on 15 July that an SCA investment plan it says it reviewed, and which is not public, projects 15,500 transits this fiscal year against 13,000.

Assessment: The revenue Cairo is booking is rent on someone else’s dysfunction. Longer voyages, split loadings and shuttle tankers tie up capacity and push barrels through Suez; they do not indicate that owners have re-priced the Bab al-Mandab as safe. That matters for the direction of the trade: a genuine Hormuz normalisation could unwind the Yanbu–Sidi Kerir routing and take part of the uplift with it, and nobody has published on that scenario. Note too the drift in the Authority’s own numbers — the State Information Service was citing roughly $8bn for FY2026/27 in December 2025, a figure hard to reconcile with $5.8–6.0bn for calendar 2026. Treat Rabie’s forecasts as budget advocacy, and the CAPMAS transit counts as the fact.