Container lines are sailing back through Bab el-Mandeb as Cairo votes to take a side
Suez revenue reached $4.67bn in FY2025/26, up 23 per cent — and still less than half the 2023 peak. Hapag-Lloyd’s first ship on the route was scheduled to sail today.
The Suez Canal Authority chairman put FY2025/26 revenue at USD 4.67 billion, a 23 per cent year-on-year rise. The comparator that matters is USD 10.25 billion in calendar 2023: the canal is earning less than half its record. Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly said as much in a CNN Business Arabic interview on 4 October, describing revenue as recovering but far below peak. The recovery’s composition is also worth reading carefully. Q2 2026 brought in USD 1.26 billion against roughly USD 1.1 billion in Q1; Rio Times, citing Africa Intelligence, attributes much of that quarterly rise to tanker traffic rerouted by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz — a windfall from someone else’s war rather than a return of the container trade. That causal attribution is the publisher’s, not established.
The container side is genuinely moving. BIMCO counts sixteen services announcing Suez returns since early July, across all three major alliances — Gemini, Ocean and Premier — plus MSC, with container transits now above 50 per cent of the 2023 level. Clarksons-based analysis points to a full return in early 2027. Hapag-Lloyd’s first ship on the route, the Umm Qarn, was scheduled to depart Tanjung Pelepas in Malaysia today; the line describes its approach as gradual and service-by-service, explicitly not a full Gemini return to the Red Sea, and the Suez transit itself had not been confirmed at the time of writing. The Loadstar reported on 12 October that the Asia–Europe return is continuing despite the deteriorating security picture from the Houthi–Saudi escalation. Seatrade has reported some carriers suggesting lines have received private assurances — an unattributed industry claim.
Assessment: The two stories on this desk are one story. Reuters framed the Houthi advance as threatening Bab el-Mandeb, “a gateway to Egypt’s Suez Canal”; Monday’s vote puts Cairo’s name on a belligerent’s ledger in the same waterway its revenue depends on. The private-assurances claim deserves the most scepticism: assurances, if they exist, were presumably given to carriers on the understanding that the canal’s owner stayed out. Egypt has just made that harder to assure. Schedules announced are not transits completed, and sixteen service announcements can be unwound in a fortnight. The number to watch is not revenue but cancellations.