Hormuz closure pushes Suez traffic to a two-year high as Cairo counts the windfall

CAPMAS, Egypt’s state statistics agency, recorded 1,340 vessel transits through the Suez Canal in July 2026, 27% more than in July 2025 and up from 1,208 in June, Bloomberg reported on 8 September. Revenue reached $505 million, the highest monthly figure since December 2023. The reporting attributes the recovery to the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz during the Iran war and continued Houthi threat in the southern Red Sea, which together pushed cargoes to exit north through Suez rather than cross Bab el-Mandeb. Lloyd’s List Intelligence, in its Red Sea Brief of 3 September, described weekly transits as elevated for a second consecutive week and at levels not seen since the start of 2024, counting at least 302 Bab el-Mandeb transits between 17 and 23 August and no attacks since 24 August, when a Bahri-owned VLCC was struck by a projectile off Yanbu.

Suez Canal Authority chairman Osama Rabie told a local television programme in the first days of September that the SCA expects full-year revenue of $5.8–6.0 billion, against $4.1 billion in calendar 2025 — a claim made on air, not in a published authority document. It sits awkwardly beside earlier official guidance: the State Information Service, on 8 December 2025, carried Rabie projecting roughly $8 billion for FY2026/27 and potentially $10 billion by FY2027/28. The underlying volumes remain depressed. Rio Times, citing CAPMAS, put second-quarter revenue at $1.26 billion on 3,580 transits, with traffic running at roughly half pre-crisis levels and container volumes down by about four-fifths. Egypt’s 2026/27 investment plan for economic authorities, reviewed by the independent outlet Al Manassa in July, assumes 15,500 transits this fiscal year, up 20% from 13,000.

Assessment: The recovery Cairo is banking is borrowed, not earned. Suez is not winning back the container lines that left in 2023; it is collecting a toll on tankers displaced by a war at the other end of the sea lane, with Yanbu cargoes topping up at Sidi Kerir and Saudi barrels routing north. That flow reverses the moment Hormuz normalises, and the composition of the traffic — tankers, not boxes — means tonnage recovers faster than the high-value container fees. Treat Rabie’s $5.8–6.0bn as a chairman’s television number until an SCA release carries it, and note it is materially below the $8bn he was projecting nine months ago. The state’s own budget assumption of 15,500 ships rests on a document the public cannot read.