Suez return accelerates: Maersk runs 67 canal transits in September versus 8 a year ago

Let me be plain about what the headline number is and what it is not. Maersk going from eight to 67 transits in a single year is a real shift, not a rounding error. But it is a Maersk number, and Maersk can decide to route its own network wherever it likes without asking you or me. The number that matters to an importer or exporter is not how many ships a carrier sends through the canal. It is whether your particular service, on your particular rotation, gets rerouted, and whether anyone tells you in time for you to change your plans.

Here is the part I keep coming back to. The Cape route and the Suez route are not the same product. They arrive on different days, they connect to different feeder networks, and they hit different ports of discharge. When a carrier flips a service from Cape to Suez, your transit time can drop meaningfully, which sounds like great news, and your discharge port can change, which is where people get hurt. I have seen a service come back through Suez and start calling a different hub, and half the shippers on that string only found out when their container showed up somewhere other than where the bill of lading implied. Nobody is trying to hide anything. The schedule change just slides through with no ceremony, and if your onward trucking is booked to a specific rail ramp, you have a problem.

So take the transit time gain seriously but verify everything around it. Assume you move 30 forty-foot containers a month from Asia to North Europe and your service brings transit down from about 40 days via the Cape to roughly 30 days via Suez. That is ten days off each box. Over 30 boxes you free up 300 container-days of in-transit inventory each month. If each container is carrying goods valued at 60,000 dollars and you cost working capital at 8 percent a year, one day of transit on one box costs about 13 dollars, so 300 container-days is roughly 3,950 dollars a month of carrying cost you get back, near enough 47,000 dollars a year. That is a real number and it lands on your cash flow, not just on a slide. I want to be careful here though, because the saving only exists if the goods actually arrive on the new date. If the service is rerouted but your customer still needs the box on the old date, you have not saved anything, you have just changed your internal calendar.

Now the risk side, because Suez is not a free lunch and everyone knows it. The canal's own revenue number tells you the Authority is pricing to attract traffic back, and revenue at 567.1 million dollars in August against a 51.1 percent jump in net tonnage is not a revenue story, it is a volume story. They are buying back the traffic. That is good for you in the medium term because it keeps the transit cost reasonable, but it also means the canal authority has a commercial interest in saying everything is fine. I would not take a canal press statement as my war risk assessment. I would take my insurer's word, in writing, on the specific leg of the voyage.

That brings me to the thing that actually costs people money in these transitions. Two years of routing around the Cape means your contracts, your insurance policies and your letters of credit have been built around a Cape assumption. Some war risk clauses and some open cover policies carve out the Red Sea, or price it separately, or require notice before a vessel transits a listed area. If your carrier quietly moves your service back through Suez and your policy still reads the way it read in 2025, you may be moving high-value cargo through a higher-risk corridor with a coverage gap you did not agree to. I have watched this exact thing create a claim dispute, and the argument was not about the loss, it was about whether the policy was ever meant to cover that voyage at all.

The letters of credit angle is the one that catches people who think they have this covered. If your contract of carriage names a routing via the Cape and the service now transits Suez, you have technically changed a term of a deal that a bank has already agreed to finance. Most of the time nobody notices and the documents still pass. But if there is a discrepancy, a discrepancy is a discrepancy, and a bank that is looking for one will find one. I would read the routing and transhipment clauses in every letter of credit I have open right now, and if the language is tight, get the issuing bank's confirmation in writing that a Suez routing is acceptable before the first box sails, not after. This is a boring afternoon of work that saves an unboring month.

On the insurance side, I want to be specific rather than alarmist. Most of the standard cover structures had a Red Sea exclusion footprint carved in during the worst of the disruption, and carriers have been transiting under specific arrangements since. If your carrier moves back to Suez and the arrangement under which the current cover was written changes, your certificate can be technically valid and substantively insufficient. That is worse than no cover, because you think you are protected. So take the certificate your forwarder issues, read the voyage it names and the area it carves out, and read the date. If the date predates the routing change, it does not tell you what you need to know.

Let me put money on that too. Say you have 25 containers on a single sailing, average declared value 60,000 dollars each, so 1.5 million dollars of cargo on one ship. If the war risk loading for a Red Sea transit is priced at 0.15 percent of insured value and your policy does not include it because the reroute happened after you bound cover, you are looking at roughly 2,250 dollars of exposure on that one sailing that nobody budgeted. That is small against 1.5 million, and I would still not sail it. The size of the number is not the point. The point is that an uninsured leg is a decision you did not make, and I do not like decisions I did not make on my own cargo.

On the booking side, the practical move is unglamorous. Your cut-off times are about to move. When a carrier flips a service back through Suez, the whole port call sequence shifts, and the gate-in window, the VGM cut-off and the document cut-off all shift with it. I would treat the October and November schedules as provisional and reconfirm every single cut-off two weeks out. If you are running a fixed weekly export programme out of a Chinese port, plan for the possibility that your normal Thursday gate-in becomes a Tuesday gate-in for one or two sailings during the transition. Miss that and your box rolls, and a rolled box in October is a very expensive box.

There is a threshold I would watch rather than a feeling. I start treating the return as structural, not experimental, when I see two things at once: a carrier putting a service back on a published rotation with a real schedule and a committed capacity allocation, and my own underwriter confirming in writing that a Red Sea transit is covered under my existing terms without a new exclusion. OOCL trialling in October and three COSCO vessels booked tells me we are at the beginning of that process, not the end of it. I would not rebuild my whole annual plan on a trial voyage. I would rebuild the November and December plan on it and leave the first quarter of next year flexible.

The capacity angle deserves its own paragraph because it is easy to miss. Twelve to fourteen extra days of round-voyage time is absorbed by every ship on the Cape route. When those ships come back to Suez, the effective capacity on the affected trades increases without a single new vessel being ordered. That is how you get the strange situation where the canal is busier, transit is faster, and rates do not fall the way you expect, because the capacity is being released into trades where demand is also moving. Net tonnage up 51.1 percent in August through the canal is a lot of steel coming back into a shorter loop. Over the next two quarters, I think that shows up as softer rates on Asia-Europe before it shows up on the transatlantic, because that is where the redeployed tonnage will land. If you have a large annual contract renewal on Asia-Europe, this is a reason to look hard at the timing of your tender rather than just renewing on last year's formula.

There is a second-order effect on equipment that nobody talks about and everybody feels. Those extra days on the Cape route have been soaking up containers. When round voyage time falls by ten to fourteen days, the same boxes come back to Asia faster, and the turn time on your own equipment pool improves. If you lease or own containers and you have been paying per diem through long Cape transits, that per diem bill drops without you doing anything. Assume you have 200 containers in the water at any one time and you save ten days of per diem at 2.50 dollars a day each. That is 5,000 dollars a month off your equipment line, 60,000 dollars a year, purely from the routing change. I have watched shippers fight a rate negotiation for weeks to get less than that. I am not suggesting you stop negotiating rates. I am suggesting that when a routing change moves three cost lines at once, you track all three, because a rate saving you can see is easier to win than a rate saving you cannot.

Because per diem and transit time are connected, I would also re-check any free time agreement you have on detention. Longer Cape transits probably pushed some of your boxes past free time at destination through no fault of yours, and most carriers were flexible about it because everyone knew why. When Suez comes back and transit times normalise, that flexibility will quietly disappear, and boxes that now sit for three days without a charge will start getting billed. I would rather know my free time terms now than argue about them after the first invoice. Ask for the current free time in writing on every service you use, and diarise the day the first Suez-routed sailing is due to arrive, because that is the day the leniency ends.

Another thing I would watch is the rail and feeder connection at the far end. A shorter ocean transit does not automatically mean a shorter door-to-door transit, because a box that arrives five days earlier can still sit at a rail ramp waiting for capacity that has not been scheduled for it. When the ocean leg speeds up, the inland legs do not speed up with it. So you get a strange outcome where your container is at the port sooner and your customer still has it later, because the bottleneck just moved from the water to the railhead. If you are moving inland by rail in the US or in Europe, book the inland leg against the new ocean arrival date before you confirm anything to your customer, and check whether the terminal is offering on-dock rail or whether you are trucking out first. Those two options have completely different cut-offs and completely different demurrage exposure.

And then the caveat that sits over all of it. This is a routing decision that can reverse. It took two years to unwind, it can rewind in a fortnight if the security picture changes, and the carriers have shown they will move fast in both directions. That is exactly why I am telling clients to take the transit time saving, bank the carrying cost, and not sign anything that assumes Suez stays open for the next twelve months. The 27 percent lift in August transits and the 48 containership transits Drewry counted in week 38 are strong signals, but a signal is not a guarantee. Keep the Cape plan on the shelf, keep the war risk conversation live with your broker, and keep one route of your programme flexible enough to absorb a reversal without a crisis meeting.

There is also a commercial angle that finance people care about more than anyone admits. Faster transit is a working capital event. If you get ten days out of your cycle, you need less inventory in the pipeline, and less inventory in the pipeline is less cash tied up and less obsolescence risk on stock that is sitting on water instead of on a shelf. For a retailer running seasonal goods, ten days matters because ten days is the difference between selling a sweater in October and marking it down in January. I would take the ten days and put the freed-up cash to work before the sea legs of the programme get tested again. And I would document the assumption I used, because the next time the rate is renegotiated, someone will ask where the saving came from and I want to be able to point at the transit time, the container-days and the cost of capital rather than at a feeling.

One more operational habit that pays in a transition window. Photograph and record the actual discharge port on your last two or three arrivals and compare it against what your booking confirmation said. It is a five minute job and it is the fastest way to catch a service quietly changing its rotation before it costs you a truck. If the discharge port has moved, everything downstream has moved too, and you have found out while it is still cheap to fix.

I have also stopped assuming that everyone in the chain has the same information at the same time. The carrier knows the rotation change weeks before the terminal updates the schedule, and the terminal knows before your forwarder does, and your forwarder knows before you do. That chain of delay is where the money leaks. If you are a small shipper without much leverage, the cheapest insurance you can buy is to ask the question early and ask it in writing, because being the last person to know about a routing change is a cost, and it is a cost you chose by not asking.

If I were sitting on the importer or exporter side of the table this week, this is what I would actually do. I would put every sailing I have booked for October and November under a routing review and ask my carrier, in writing, whether the service is currently planned to transit Suez or the Cape, because that answer changes my delivery dates and my demurrage exposure. I would take the transit time gain on non-critical cargo and keep critical, fixed-date cargo on whatever routing gives me the most certainty rather than the fastest transit. I would get my marine underwriter to confirm cover in writing for a Red Sea transit under my existing terms, and if there is a gap, I would rather pay a known war risk loading than carry an unknown exposure. I would re-time my Asia-Europe tender to sit after the redeployed capacity has shown up in the market, not before. And I would tell my customers what is changing, because the last time carriers moved a service quietly, the only people who got hurt were the ones who found out from the terminal rather than from their forwarder.

• Ask every carrier in writing by 2 October whether each October and November sailing transits Suez or the Cape, and rebuild delivery dates from the answer rather than from the old Cape schedule.
• Reconfirm gate-in, VGM and document cut-offs two weeks out for every October sailing, and assume the weekly rhythm shifts by one or two days during the routing transition.
• Get your marine underwriter to confirm in writing that a Red Sea transit is covered under existing terms; if there is a gap, budget a known war risk loading instead of carrying the exposure.
• Take the transit time saving on non-critical cargo only, and calculate it as freed working capital, roughly 3,950 dollars a month on 30 containers at 60,000 dollars of goods value and 8 percent cost of capital.
• Shift the Asia-Europe annual tender to after the redeployed capacity shows up in the market, and expect the first rate softening on Asia-Europe rather than the transatlantic.
• Treat the return as experimental until a carrier publishes a real rotation with committed allocation and your underwriter confirms cover, and keep one flexible lane in the programme into the first quarter.