Suez revenue climbs 57 percent on a recovery built partly on other people’s wars

Suez Canal Authority chairman Osama Rabie disclosed at Egypt’s World Maritime Day event in Alexandria that August revenues reached $567.1 million, up 56.7 percent from $326 million in August 2025. A total of 1,358 vessels transited against 1,070 a year earlier, a 27 percent increase, while net tonnage rose 51.1 percent from 45.2 million tonnes to 68.3 million tonnes. FreightWaves put July at 1,340 vessels and $505 million, making the sequential gain modest in vessel count but pronounced in revenue — an improving vessel mix rather than simply more hulls. Rabie said navigation was operating normally and described the waterway as safe. He forecasts 2026 revenue of $5.8–6 billion; FY2025/26 closed at $4.67 billion, up 23 percent. The record year, FY2022/23, brought in about $9.4 billion.

The specialist outlet see.news argued on 6 October that the canal is having its best months in nearly three years and that the cause is not a calmer sea: much of the growth comes from tankers pushed toward Egypt by attacks and closures elsewhere. The same analysis notes Hormuz normalising, with Gulf oil exporters topping prewar levels for about half of September, which would remove the diversion incentive; and that ships entering from the south still pass Bab al-Mandab, now at the centre of Houthi–Saudi escalation. Close to 100 ships were attacked or hijacked between November 2023 and early 2026, and canal traffic in the first week of 2026 was still roughly 60 percent below the same week in 2023. Rabie frames the Authority’s answer as diversification: shipbuilding and repair, bunkering, crew changes during transit, and participation in reopening the Port of Sirte after a 14-year closure.

Assessment: Read the tonnage line, not the revenue line. Transits up 27 percent against tonnage up 51.1 percent means the large boxships and tankers that fled in 2023 are testing the route again, which is a better signal of restored underwriter confidence than the headline percentage. But the diversion thesis cuts the other way: revenue borrowed from someone else’s risk premium is revenue that leaves when the premium does, and Rabie’s $5.8–6 billion forecast still sits a third below FY2022/23. Two caveats on the data. The figures are self-reported by the Authority, and CEIC’s series carries $570.6 million for August against the chairman’s $567.1 million — small, but both numbers will circulate, and nobody has established which is the official line.