The Cautious Comeback: Why Suez Transits Are Returning Only in Stages

After more than two years of large-scale detours around the Cape of Good Hope, the container shipping industry began 2026 expecting a gradual return to Red Sea routing via the Suez Canal. What materialised instead was a false start: a brief window of resumed transits followed by a rapid reversal as geopolitical conditions deteriorated once more, leaving carriers, shippers, and freight-rate analysts navigating another prolonged period of uncertainty.

A Brief Window That Closed

In mid-February 2026, the Gemini Cooperation — the Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd alliance — moved its ME11/IMX service back through the Red Sea, signalling to the market that conditions might finally be stable enough for a systematic return. The announcement triggered a wave of reassessment across the industry. Analysts at Xeneta noted that any large-scale return would absorb roughly 2.5 million TEU of effective capacity that had been soaked up by longer Cape-routed voyages, compressing freight rates substantially on major East–West trades.

Within weeks, however, both carriers reversed course. Escalating strikes in the region — involving Iranian, Israeli and US forces — made the corridor too unpredictable for reliable scheduling. ME11 and several other services returned to the longer southern route, and Suez Canal transit volumes remained approximately 60% below pre-crisis levels through the first quarter of 2026.

Why Carriers Are Not Moving Together

The episode exposed a strategic divergence that has defined the industry's approach throughout this crisis. Maersk, buoyed by Gemini's strong schedule reliability numbers, has consistently expressed a higher appetite for risk on the Suez route. CMA CGM, by contrast, opted to keep several services anchored to the Cape, citing the inability to guarantee schedule integrity for shipper commitments when security incidents remain unpredictable.

This divergence is not merely tactical. Carriers with tight hub-and-spoke architectures — where a single delayed mainliner can ripple through multiple shuttle connections — have the most to lose from an unexpected closure or security incident mid-voyage. A full return requires not just calm waters on a given day, but sustained confidence across a multi-week planning horizon.

The Capacity and Rate Equation

The freight-rate calculus around any genuine return is significant. Cape routing has, since early 2024, effectively inflated effective fleet capacity utilisation by keeping vessels at sea for longer. The Asia–Europe voyage via the Cape of Good Hope adds roughly ten to fourteen days compared with the Suez transit, meaning each vessel completes fewer round trips per year. That latent capacity acts as a natural floor under rates.

Should a full, co-ordinated return materialise — even across a single major alliance — that floor would erode quickly. Xeneta's modelling suggests freight rates on key global trades could see significant downward pressure if normalisation accelerates into the second half of 2026. The caveat is timing: a phased, service-by-service return would allow rates to adjust gradually, whereas a sudden industry-wide shift would be far more disruptive.

Congestion Risk at the Other End

Analysts from Bertling and Marine Insight have raised a separate concern that has received less attention: if carriers do return to the Suez route in volume, the ports at both ends of the canal may not be ready. The two-plus years of Cape routing fundamentally restructured transhipment patterns, calling patterns and port-hinterland flows. A rapid reversal could generate acute congestion at Mediterranean hubs — Algeciras, Port Said, Piraeus — that have not had to handle the same volume mix since early 2024.

For logistics teams managing cargo on Asia–Europe lanes, this means that even a return to the shorter route does not automatically translate into faster or more predictable transits. The first wave of services through a reopened corridor may face terminal queues and yard congestion at both the load and discharge ends that offset much of the transit-time benefit. Port planners at both Jeddah and Port Said have flagged the need for significant berth and yard capacity preparation before handling volumes can safely return to pre-2024 levels.

Air Cargo Implications

The disruption has had a notable knock-on effect on air freight. Certain time-sensitive cargo segments that could not absorb the extended ocean transit shifted to air or air-sea combinations. That incremental air demand has eased progressively as the ocean market adjusted, but it has not disappeared entirely. A definitive return to Suez routing would complete the unwind of that shift, removing one tailwind from the airfreight market at a time when belly capacity is already expanding with passenger network growth.

Visibility in a Bifurcated Network

For shippers with cargo split across alliance services — some on Cape routes, others on the early Suez returners — the practical challenge is one of shipment visibility and milestone normalisation. When a single consignment passes through two different routing configurations across separate carrier legs, expected arrival windows can diverge by two weeks or more. Platforms that normalise carrier milestone data across route variants and flag ETA changes against original booking windows provide the kind of operational clarity that static track-and-trace tools cannot. In a market where route uncertainty is structural rather than temporary, that normalisation layer is no longer a convenience — it is a baseline requirement for supply chain planning.

Source: Air Cargo News