Suez Canal Authority meets Hapag-Lloyd twice in ten days as Bab al-Mandab risk persists
Chairman Ossama Rabiee’s diplomacy with shipping lines is running faster than the traffic recovery it is meant to secure.
The Suez Canal Authority’s own site reported on 30 October that it held a video conference with Hapag-Lloyd on “ways to enhance cooperation” — the second meeting between Rabiee’s authority and the German carrier inside ten days, after an in-person session on 21 October. Around the same date, an SCA statement said Rabiee met Greece’s ambassador to Cairo, Nikolaos Papageorgiou, on trade and logistics investment. Neither is traffic news; the cadence is the signal. The underlying numbers remain well below pre-disruption levels. Rabiee has put FY2025/26 canal revenue at $4.67bn, up 23% year on year, with August 2026 bringing in $567m from 1,358 transits, a 27% annual rise. Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly said on 4 October that Egypt is still losing “over $6bn a year.”
Carriers are hedging in public. CMA CGM’s executive vice president for assets and operations, Christine Cabau, said on 14 October that the company is continuing its return to Suez as a permanent and sustainable route; Hapag-Lloyd confirmed in September, per Al-Monitor, that another Asia–Mediterranean container service would transit Suez and Bab al-Mandab in October and December. Against that, ACLED reported about four weeks ago that Houthi territorial gains around Bab al-Mandab and renewed attacks on Saudi Arabia have raised the risk to Red Sea shipping and energy infrastructure. One further caution on the quarterly figures: Rio Times and Financial Afrik attribute the $1.26bn Q2 revenue print partly to tanker traffic rerouted by a closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a framing Rio Times sources to Africa Intelligence and which this desk could not independently confirm.
Assessment: Canal receipts are the hard-currency line that reserve headlines obscure. Net international reserves hit $57.35bn at end-September, a record in level terms, but the month added only $133.7m — a chart of monthly deltas reads nothing like a chart of the level, and Egypt Independent credits remittances, not trade, for the banking sector’s $31.2bn in net foreign assets. That is why Rabiee is on video calls with carriers rather than announcing volumes. A recovery narrative written off two Hapag-Lloyd meetings and a CMA CGM quote would be premature: the carriers' return is conditional, incremental and reversible, and the body tracking the threat says the threat is growing.