Evergreen’s first Suez transit in three years completes the Ocean Alliance’s return
The 16,556 TEU Ever Eon passed through the canal on 8 November, leaving the Suez Canal Authority’s October revenue figure of $724m looking less like a spike than a floor — if the Red Sea holds.
Evergreen’s Ever Eon — 369 metres long, 53.6 metres wide, roughly 185,000 tons deadweight, with capacity up to 16,556 TEU — transited the Suez Canal on 8 November en route from the Netherlands to Singapore on the Ocean Alliance’s NEU7 service, its operator’s first passage in nearly three years, Ahram Online reported. Evergreen was the last of the alliance’s four members to return; CMA CGM, COSCO Shipping and OOCL had already resumed. Ahram rendered SCA chairman Osama Rabie as calling the return a positive indicator of global trade flows returning to a sustainable course between East and West; Ship & Bunker carried the same substance and added that Evergreen intends further voyages in the coming period. The underlying item is an SCA social-media post and the chairman’s name appears in two transliterations across outlets, so The Files is not running it as a direct quotation.
The forward schedule rests on one source. Splash247, citing the consultancy Linerlytica, reported that Evergreen would send Ever Eon and Ever Edit through on 7 and 11 November and the 20,124 TEU Ever Gifted on 16 November on the alliance’s MD2 Mediterranean service. Ever Eon slipped a day; whether Ever Edit sailed on the 11th is unconfirmed. Splash247 also reported the Premier Alliance — Ocean Network Express, HMM and Yang Ming — preparing to restore further Mediterranean services, and cited a Xeneta estimate that a comprehensive Suez return would effectively release 6 to 8 per cent of global containership capacity. Container News reported the SCA’s own cautious framing: a broader return of container services remains dependent on operating conditions in the Red Sea.
Assessment: Cairo will present October’s $724m as proof of normalisation. Part of it is not. Container Management reported Suez revenue up 42 per cent in July on Hormuz rerouting — traffic displaced by the Gulf war, which reverses the moment that war does. Rabie’s $6.6bn full-year target implies roughly $550m a month; October cleared it with no Evergreen volume in the numbers. November’s figure, due in early December, is the first that can separate structural return from war dividend. Watch the schedule, not the rhetoric: one slipped sailing is noise, a second is carriers still hedging. Ever Gifted on the 16th, on a Mediterranean rotation, is the harder test.