Suez Canal Container Tonnage Rises 54.2% as Carriers Return
COSCO's return and OOCL PORTUGAL's first transit arrive as Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd move four Gemini services back to the trans-Suez route.
Tariq Benali Tariq Benali covers business and corporate news across the UAE and MENA for Anecdoted, tracking the deals, leadership moves and regulatory shifts behind the region's companies. tariq@anecdoted.com
Container ship net tonnage through the Suez Canal rose 54.2% to about 72.1 million tons in the first eight months of 2026, according to the Suez Canal Authority. The authority attributes the increase to major shipping lines restoring services through the waterway.
Wednesday's traffic came to 39 vessels and 2.3 million tons of net tonnage, the authority said.
OOCL PORTUGAL completes a first transit
The mega container ship OOCL PORTUGAL passed through the canal for the first time on September 16, on a voyage from Belgium to China. The vessel is about 400 meters long, carries a gross tonnage of 247,000 tons and can hold up to 24,000 TEUs. It operates on Ocean Alliance's NEU2 service, which links major ports between the Far East and northwestern Europe.
The authority called that transit significant, because it was COSCO SHIPPING Lines' first southbound Suez Canal passage since tensions escalated in the Red Sea and Bab El-Mandab. COSCO SHIPPING Lines has returned to the canal.
Carriers rebuild Europe-Asia services
Ossama Rabiee, the authority's Chairman and Managing Director, said the canal had restored maritime services operated by several major shipping groups on the Europe-Asia trade route. He listed CMA CGM, Maersk, MSC, Hapag-Lloyd and COSCO among them.
The figures point to a broader recovery in container shipping through the canal following a long stretch of Red Sea disruption. Shipping lines had sent their fleets around the Cape of Good Hope to avoid attacks by Yemen's Houthis, which began in late 2023.
Two different measures appear in the authority's data. Net tonnage, the basis for the 54.2% increase, reflects the volume of a ship's cargo-carrying space. Gross tonnage, the 247,000-ton figure attached to OOCL PORTUGAL, measures a vessel's total enclosed volume. The eight-month window runs from January through August.
Routing decisions carry weight beyond the canal's own traffic counts. Sending a ship around the Cape adds distance and time to an Asia-Europe voyage, changing fuel burn, schedules and emissions for the carrier. That is why the return of individual services matters to shippers, not just the aggregate tonnage.
On Monday, Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd said they would move four services under their Gemini Cooperation from the Cape of Good Hope to the trans-Suez route. Maersk called the Suez Canal a key maritime corridor linking East and West, and said the Suez-Red Sea route is the fastest, most sustainable and most efficient option for moving goods between Asia and Europe.
