Maersk CEO:2026 or a turning point for the full recovery of Suez routes

Nearly three years after bypassing the Cape of Good Hope, one of the most important corridors for global container shipping is gradually returning. Maersk CEO Ke Wensheng said recently that if there are no new changes in the situation in Yemen and the Red Sea, the current security conditions are basically in place, and the company is confident that it will gradually resume more routes through the Suez Canal in 2026 and finally achieve a full return.

However, Maersk did not give a precise "full recovery" timetable. At this stage, whether the ship passes through the Red Sea and the Suez Canal will still be dynamically assessed according to the local security situation.

When announcing the results for the second quarter of 2026, Ko Wensheng said that the company believes that the safety conditions required for the full restoration of the Suez Canal route are in place. He stressed that this judgment is not static, but is based on continuous safety assessment and relevant agency information. As long as there are no major new changes in the situation in Yemen, the current security conditions are sufficient to support further expansion of the Red Sea route.

However, this does not mean that Maersk will immediately redeploy all vessels to the Suez route. Ke Wensheng clearly pointed out that the relevant decision-making is still a daily assessment nature, once the navigation risk rises again, the ship may still bypass the Cape of good hope in Africa.

Maersk has begun a gradual return process. According to Ke Wensheng, about 1/3 of the normal traffic has now re-passed through the Suez Canal and the Bab al-Mandeb Strait. In the next phase, Maersk will further coordinate with Gemini partner Hapg-Lloth to evaluate the possibility of more route resumption after the summer. Prior to this, the two companies have successively promoted some services to re-enter the Red Sea, and further added a jointly operated Red Sea route in August. This shows that Maersk's return is not a one-time completion, but to take a "gradual recovery, continuous evaluation" approach.

From the perspective of the market as a whole, the Red Sea shipping activities have also recovered to a certain extent. Lloyd "s List Intelligence data show that after the Houthi armed forces announced a blockade against Saudi-related ships on July 20, the traffic volume in the Mandeb Strait remained generally stable. A total of 273 ships passed through this key shipping throat between July 27 and August 2, a number slightly higher than the previous week, indicating that some shipowners are still choosing to continue through the Red Sea rather than re-circumvent the Cape of Good Hope.

However, the risk of Red Sea navigation has not completely disappeared. Since mid-July, tanker throughput has fallen by about 40%, while the closure of AIS ship signals has increased, reflecting the fact that shipowners remain highly vigilant about the local security situation. Therefore, the current market changes are more accurately described as "gradual recovery", rather than the Red Sea route has fully returned to normal.

Although Maersk is more confident about the recovery of the Red Sea route, the company has not lowered its safety standards as a result. Ke Wensheng said that the company assesses the local security situation every day. If it judges that there is a risk, the ship will still bypass the southern tip of Africa. Especially when the situation in Yemen is still uncertain, whether the Red Sea route can continue to recover depends on whether the local security environment can remain stable.

The United Nations also recently warned that the risk of a large-scale conflict in Yemen is rising, and the possibility of attacks on merchant ships in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden is still an issue that shipping companies need to pay attention. For shipping companies, re-entering the Suez Canal is not a simple route adjustment, but also involves crew safety, insurance, navigation risks and the redeployment of the entire global route network.

If the situation in the Red Sea remains stable, more and more shipping companies will redeploy their ships to the Suez route, which will have a significant impact on the global container transportation market. In the past three years, a large number of ships have bypassed the Cape of Good Hope, which has significantly lengthened the voyage from Asia to Europe, and at the same time occupied more capacity, which has supported market freight rates to a certain extent. Once a large number of ships return to the Suez Canal, the shortened voyage means that the same number of ships can take on more transport tasks, and the global effective capacity will increase, which may further change the relationship between capacity supply and demand and put pressure on maritime freight rates.

At the same time, Maersk and Hapo-Lloyd also warned that if a large number of ships return to the Suez route in a short period of time, some European ports are already under greater operational pressure, and the concentration of new ships may aggravate port congestion. Therefore, even if the situation in the Red Sea continues to improve, shipping companies will not "swarm" a full return in the short term, and are more likely to adopt a phased recovery approach.

Judging from the current situation, the Suez Canal route is undergoing a slow but definite recovery. Maersk has now re-entered the Red Sea with about 1/3 of its normal traffic and plans to continue to evaluate the resumption of more routes with Hapg-Lloth. However, it should be noted that Maersk's "conditions for full recovery" are not determined to be full recovery. As long as the situation in Yemen and the Red Sea remains stable, Maersk believes that 2026 is expected to be the turning point for the gradual end of the nearly three-year shipping disturbance.

For shippers and forwarders, if this trend continues, new changes may take place in the range, schedule, capacity allocation and shipping rates of future Asia-Europe routes.