Two carrier meetings in three days as Suez courts the lines that left

Suez Canal Authority chairman Osama Rabie met Juan Pablo Richards, a regional head at Hapag-Lloyd, on Wednesday 21 October to discuss cooperation and raising vessel transits, according to Ahram Online and a same-day posting by the SCA itself. The day before, Rabie held a videoconference with A.P. Moller-Maersk. The Spanish trade outlet El Estrecho Digital, which named the Maersk participant as Boulos, reported the group conveyed an expectation that all of its services will have resumed Suez transit before March 2027 — and was explicit that this is an expectation, not a commitment. It is single-sourced for that date in the material available. The Egyptian Gazette, citing the same meeting, put Maersk’s January–September 2026 transits at 276 voyages and 23.3 million net tons, against 146 voyages and 7.0 million net tons in the same nine months of 2025.

Read those two pairs of numbers together and the shape of the recovery appears. Voyages did not quite double; tonnage more than trebled. The ships coming back are the big ones, which is what the canal’s fee structure rewards and what a carrier does when it is confident enough to route its largest assets through a corridor rather than testing it with spare capacity. That is a meaningful vote, but it is one carrier over nine months, measured against a 2025 base that was itself a trough. It is also a vote that can be reversed in a week by a single successful attack, which is why the SCA is holding meetings rather than announcing schedules.

The revenue line is the honest frame. SCA chairman Rabie put FY2025/26 canal revenue at USD 4.67bn, up 23% year on year, in a television interview on Sada al-Balad reported by Egyptian Streets in June; the same piece gives the 2023 peak as USD 9.4bn. A 23% recovery still leaves the canal earning roughly half what it did before the diversions. Elsewhere in the external accounts the picture is firmer: net international reserves hit a record USD 57.348bn at end-September on provisional central bank data, a ninth consecutive monthly rise, per Arab News. The IMF’s Jihad Azour told Bloomberg on 15 October that once the final review of the USD 8bn facility concludes, “we can discuss with the authorities what are their plans, what are their priorities, and if they want another program or not.”

Assessment: Cairo needs the canal story to be a recovery, and the carriers need Cairo to believe it so the transit-fee discussions stay friendly. Both sides have reasons to talk up a timeline neither controls, since the variable is Red Sea risk, not Egyptian salesmanship. Treat the March 2027 date as a planning assumption inside one shipping line, not a scheduled event — and note that forecasts of a phased return, including Drewry’s, are commercial advisory products sold to the same industry making the decision. The number that will settle this is monthly revenue measured against USD 9.4bn, not press releases counting meetings.