Suez posts its best month since the Red Sea closed, and the authority counting it is the one that benefits
Admiral Osama Rabie says the canal took $724 million in October on 1,490 transits, up 94 percent year on year. The figure is on the record, unaudited, and still below the pre-crisis monthly peak.
Suez Canal Authority chairman Osama Rabie told a roundtable hosted by the Egyptian Businessmen’s Association on Thursday 5 November that the waterway handled 1,490 vessels in October 2026, carrying 88 million tons of net tonnage and generating $724 million, against $373 million in October 2025. Reuters, TASS and Al-Monitor carried the numbers; the SCA issued its own statement, in which Rabie described “a remarkable improvement despite the geopolitical challenges in the region.” At face value it is the strongest month since Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping began in late 2023, and a 94.1 percent annual increase. It is also an authority-sourced count: the SCA publishes the figure and is the institution the figure flatters. No independent AIS-based transit tally was available to cross-check the 1,490.
Two things complicate the recovery framing. The first is the baseline. Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly said on 4 October that canal revenue had fallen from roughly $10 billion a year to $3.3 billion — about $833 million a month at the peak. October’s $724 million, an annualised run-rate near $8.7 billion, is still some 13 percent below that monthly high. The second is the comparator arithmetic. Egypt Today’s write-up of the same roundtable gives 1,128 vessels and 47 million tons for the year-ago month; Egypt Telegraph reports Rabie citing a 65 percent rise in vessel numbers, which implies a base closer to 900. The three cannot all be right, and no percentage for vessel growth should be treated as settled until the SCA’s own text resolves it.
Assessment: The question the number does not answer is whose crisis it is measuring. Africa Intelligence attributed the second-quarter recovery to tanker traffic rerouted by the Hormuz closure — a diversion, not a normalisation. Rabie, per one Arabic aggregator, argues Hormuz matters little to Suez compared with Bab al-Mandab. Both cannot hold. If October is windfall from someone else’s chokepoint, it reverses when that chokepoint reopens; if it is returning liner traffic, it persists. The same aggregator reports the 2026 target raised to $6.6 billion from $6.2 billion, unconfirmed in the wire copy. H2 needs about $703 million a month to clear it. October does. August, at $567 million, did not.