Suez revenue jumps 57 per cent in August while daily transits stay a third below 2023
Suez Canal Authority chairman Osama Rabie put August income at $567.1m and told an Alexandria audience the waterway was safe. The traffic series he did not lead with shows the recovery is still barely half-finished.
Rabie announced the figures on Sunday 20 September at a World Maritime Day event in Alexandria organised by the Ministry of Transport’s Maritime Transport Sector. Against August 2025, revenue rose 56.7 per cent to $567.1m from $326m, transits rose 27 per cent to 1,358 vessels from 1,070, and net tonnage rose 51.1 per cent to 68.3m tons from 45.2m. Full-year revenue for FY2025/26 came in at $4.67bn, up 23 per cent. The comparison Rabie did not build the speech around is the one that measures the hole: average daily transits ran at about 40.8 vessels between January and August 2026, against 73.7 a day across 2023. Per Amwal Al Ghad, he said the canal was safe, traffic was operating normally, services were functioning efficiently and pilots were at high levels of readiness.
The carrier picture behind the numbers remains provisional. Food Business MEA reports MSC partially restoring Suez transits on East-West services, but the baseline is thin: Maersk’s first Red Sea transit since December 2023 was the Maersk Sebarok, 6,648 teu, in December 2025, which the line itself described as a trial with no immediate plans to repeat it; CMA CGM sent the 15,536-teu CMA CGM Adonis through in the same period. Rabie forecast at the time that normal transit rates would return in the second half of 2026. That forecast is now testable, and the 40.8-a-day figure says it has not been met. No carrier statement from September establishes whether MSC is committing tonnage or still testing.
Assessment: Read the speech as an underwriting pitch rather than a results release. The Suez Canal Authority self-reports, is not independently audited, and its chairman’s direct interest is in persuading insurers and box lines that the southern Red Sea is priced wrong. The growth rates are real arithmetic off a collapsed 2025 base; the transits-per-day series is the one that tells carriers whether to rewrite networks. Note also the timing: Sisi endorsed the Saudi call for secure Red Sea navigation on 15 September, and Rabie delivered the same argument to shipping five days later. One policy, two audiences. Loss claims circulating at $10bn and $11bn are running tallies of different vintages and should not be cited without a date.