Drewry: Suez Canal Containership Crossings Recover
Drewry’s Red Sea Diversion Tracker delivers timely intelligence to shippers, carriers, ports and other stakeholders on the evolving structure of carrier networks in the region. This tracker page will be updated fortnightly (every other Tuesday).
Red Sea Diversion Tracker – assessment for 05 May 2026
The number of containerships sailing via the Suez Canal recovered in the last 2 weeks, going back to the pre-Iran conflict levels, according to the Drewry Red Sea Diversion Tracker.
In the 2-week period ended 3 May, 56 containerships transited through Suez (27 in week 17 and 29 in week 18). The 2-week total was up 33% from the 42 transits in the previous 2-week period ended 17 April.
Much of the increase was due to CMA CGM, which ramped up the number of its 8,000teu+ Suez transits to 10 in the latest 2-week period, up from 2 in the previous 2-week period. CMA CGM now operates 4 services via Suez using large ships: OCR (Japan-North Europe), EPIC (South Asia-North Europe), MEX (Asia-Mediterranean) and IMEX (South Asia- Mediterranean), reportedly charging premium rates in return for the faster transits.
In the latest 2-week period, CMA CGM and MSC were again the only carriers which sent ships of more than 8,000teu capacities through the Suez Canal, Drewry AIS tracking shows.
Meanwhile, the number of vessels sailing around the Cape of Good Hope rose 6% to 353 the 2-week period ended 3 May , up from 333 in the 2-week period ended 17 April. The Cape still remains the dominant route to connect Asia and Europe and a wholesale return to the Suez route seems very remote.
Drewry provides updated forecasts of container traffic demand, bunker prices and freight rates in the March 2026 Drewry Container Forecaster, including rational scenarios to consider in planning.
Drewry is tracking 5 indicators which enable stakeholders to monitor the progress of the return to the Suez Canal in its Container Capacity Insight: “Best case” Asia-Europe transit times, Port congestion (vessel waiting times), Schedule reliability and Carrier capacity.
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