Suez receipts climb 21.6% while ships are sinking at a rival chokepoint nobody in Cairo mentions
The canal’s recovery is real in the central bank’s audited figures. Whether it is a Red Sea normalisation or a windfall from the closure of Hormuz determines how long it lasts.
The most citable canal number in the window is not from the Suez Canal Authority but from the Central Bank: transit receipts of $4.4bn in FY2025/26, up 21.6%, in Monday’s balance of payments release. SCA chairman Osama Rabie announced 1,358 vessels in August, traffic up 27% year on year and revenue of $567m, a figure the Italian shipping journal inforMARE carried independently at +26.9%. Quarterly revenue reached $1.26bn in Q2 2026, about 13% above roughly $1.1bn in Q1. The baseline against which all of this is measured remains depressed: 12,758 vessels in calendar 2025, down 3.4% on 2024, and a 2023 peak of $10.25bn that Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly acknowledged on 4 October the canal remains far below. Planning Minister Ahmed Rostom told Arab News on 5 October that canal revenue was rebounding 23% and that the government expects growth “to reach at least 5.4 percent.”
On Tuesday the SCA announced the maiden transit of the CMA CGM PANTHEON, net tonnage 221,000 tonnes, and a sharp rise in transits by medium and large vessels of that carrier — an announcement relayed by a state-aligned paper, not independently verified traffic data, but a leading indicator Cairo will publicise. Sourcing Journal reported on 14 October that the container sector’s Red Sea return is outpacing expectations, citing a Drewry projection of a phased return reaching 80% of pre-diversion levels by February. Running underneath all of it is a second driver. Rio Times, an aggregator, attributed the Q2 revenue rise to tanker traffic rerouted by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz; Al Jazeera’s Middle East live page on 14 October carried “Iran vows to fight until US accepts demands; ships sink in Hormuz.”
Assessment: Two recoveries are being counted as one. A container line returning because the Red Sea looks survivable is a durable gain that can be reversed by a single hull strike. A tanker diverted because Hormuz is a combat zone is a windfall that ends the day the strait reopens, and ends abruptly. No public figure in this window splits the tanker share from the box share, and until someone does, the 5.4% growth target and the budget line that rests on it are built on an undifferentiated number. Note also which numbers Cairo sources to the central bank and which to the canal authority: the audited ones are the ones to use.