Suez traffic recovers on bigger ships while Cairo’s agencies publish competing revenue figures

Suez Canal Authority chairman Lt. Gen. Osama Rabie held a videoconference on Tuesday 13 October with CMA CGM executives — Christine Cabau, executive vice-president for assets and operations, and Tarek Zaghloul, the group’s chief executive for Egypt and Sudan — on the French carrier’s return of services to full Suez transit. Rabie released navigation data for July–September 2026: 166 medium and large container ships above 130,000 tons, carrying 29m net tons, against 16 ships and 2.4m net tons in the same quarter of 2025. The figures were reported by Ahl Masr News and Egypt Telegraph; no wire picked them up, and they remain SCA-published rather than independently verified. Lloyd’s List Intelligence, in its Red Sea Brief of 1 October, put weekly transits at an average of 287 between 31 August and 27 September, 281 across August and 252 through June. Cosco and OOCL joined CMA CGM in resuming Red Sea routing in mid-September, per Linerlytica.

The revenue picture is less orderly. The Central Bank’s balance of payments release of 12 October puts FY2025/26 transit dues at about $4.4bn. Rabie has separately put the same fiscal year at $4.67bn, up 23%, with August 2026 revenue of $567.1m against $326m a year earlier. Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly, in a CNN Business Arabic interview reported on 4 October, said canal income had run near $10bn before Red Sea disruption, fell to $3.3bn — a loss of more than $6bn a year — and has recovered to about $4.4bn, without specifying a fiscal period. The SCA’s own historical markers are $10.25bn in calendar 2023 and $3.991bn in 2024. Three state figures for one twelve-month period, two of which cannot both be right.

The traffic depends on a war Cairo is now lobbying to contain. Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty telephoned his Iranian counterpart Abbas Araghchi on 13 October and, per the Egyptian ministry readout as reported in the Times of Israel live blog, said there was “no justification for these attacks and they cannot be accepted,” calling for an immediate halt to Houthi strikes on Saudi Arabia and for a political solution to the Iran–US conflict. Lloyd’s List records the mechanism Egypt is navigating: weekly crude transits rose from 53 (6.7m dwt) in January–February to 67 (9.4m dwt) after the Houthi naval ban on Saudi Arabia took effect on 20 July, then fell back to 53 and 6.7m dwt in the last week of September, the lowest tonnage since mid-July, after an attack halted crude exports from Yanbu.

Assessment: The gap between a 22.4% rise in net tonnage and a 9.8% rise in vessel numbers is the whole recovery in one line: fewer, larger ships, which is what carrier reinstatement looks like before volume returns. Treat the 166-versus-16 comparison as directionally real and precisely unverified — it is a single size class, chosen by the authority publishing it, measured against a trough quarter. The revenue discrepancy matters more than the traffic. When the central bank, the canal authority and the prime minister circulate three figures for one fiscal year, the quantity being managed is confidence, and the $4.4bn that sits inside the balance of payments is the one with an audit trail. Abdelatty’s call to Tehran belongs on this desk rather than the diplomatic one: rerouted Saudi crude is canal income, and so is a ceasefire.