Evergreen returns to Suez after nearly three years, and capacity is still four-tenths short of 2023

Suez Canal Authority chairman Osama Rabie announced on Sunday 8 November that Evergreen had resumed transits, with the container ship EVER EON making its maiden passage after a suspension of nearly three years dating to the start of the Red Sea crisis. Rabie called the return a positive indication that global trade between East and West was gradually returning to a sustainable course, said the line planned further voyages, and listed CMA CGM, Maersk, MSC, Hapag-Lloyd, COSCO and Evergreen as services the canal has regained. The independent schedule data is firmer than the statement: the liner consultancy Linerlytica, carried in trade press, has the 16,556 teu Ever Eon and Ever Edit transiting on Ocean Alliance’s NEU7/CES service on 7 and 11 November, and Evergreen relaunching its China–Red Sea OGRD service from 12 November with four ships of 7,000–9,000 teu on a fortnightly rotation.

The scale is the correction to the celebration. Sea-Intelligence data carried in trade press put around 3m teu of containership capacity through the canal in the four weeks to late October — more than double August levels, but still well below the roughly 5.5m teu recorded in October 2023 before the crisis. On Asia–Mediterranean trades, 70–80% of westbound capacity and 80–90% of eastbound is expected to route via Suez in November and December, and Premier Alliance will send two more Asia–Mediterranean services through from November after returning FE1 and IOX/INX. Revenue tracks the same partial curve: $4.67bn in FY2025/26, up 23% against the $7.2bn of FY2023/24, which itself had fallen 23.4%; $505m in July, up 42% and the highest month since December 2023; $567.1m in August, up 56.7% on a year earlier, with 1,358 vessels against 1,070. Rabie has said he expects $5.8bn–$6bn for full-year 2026.

Assessment: The Evergreen transit is an event; the “full return” around it is a forecast, and the schedules it rests on are four ships and two services. Note what is driving the recovery in the trade accounts — rerouting after the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz to commercial shipping. Cairo’s hard-currency earner is being refilled by someone else’s war, as it was emptied by someone else’s war, and the same escalation that fills it is what the stockpile order upstairs is hedging against. Treat the state’s own arithmetic carefully: Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly put canal revenue at about $4.4bn on 4 October while the canal authority reported $4.67bn for the fiscal year to June, and described a pre-crisis annual figure of about $10bn falling to $3.3bn.