EGYPT’S Suez Canal will offer containerships a 15% discount on transit fees from Thursday in a bid to entice shipping lines back into the Red Sea.

The move to slash transit fees follows a tentative “ceasefire” announcement from the Houthis earlier this month and a gap of nearly seven months since the last successful attack on a ship in the Red Sea.

Senior officials form the Suez Canal Authority have been hosting a series of high-level industry meetings over recent days as part of a charm offensive to convince shipping to return to the canal in light of improved security assessments. 

Suez Canal’s revenue plunged to $880.9m in the fourth quarter of 2024, down sharply from $2.4bn a year earlier, according to Egypt’s central bank.

While the prospect of discounted transit fees is understood to have been discussed with senior industry officials several months ago, the SCA is only now offering the reduced fees amid tentative indications from shipping companies that they may start to run limited services back through the Red Sea.

SCA chairman Osama Rabie announced on Tuesday during a meeting with the Italian ambassador to Cairo that a discount of 15% on the transit fees for containerships with a net tonnage of 130,000 tonnes or more (laden or empty) would be offered from May 15, for a period of 90 days.

“This comes in response to the requirements of many customers, including owners and operators of containerships, and in an effort to encourage major shipping lines to return to transiting the Suez Canal,” said Rabie.

Major owners and operators that rerouted to avoid the Red Sea and the risk of becoming a target of Houthi aggression have recently started returning, albeit with a series of tentative test runs.

In March there was an increase in the number of medium to very large companies, assessed at the beneficial owner level, represented in the fleet of vessels passing through the Bab el Mandeb, according to an analysis of Lloyd’s List Intelligence vessel-tracking and ownership data.

Last week Rabie hosted a series of meetings with industry representatives, include management from ship agencies, operators and several of the lines including CMA CGM.

It is not clear whether specific discounts were offered as part of those meetings, but CMA CGM executive vice-president of assets and operations Christine Cabau said after the meeting that the French line was “keen on going back to transiting through the Suez Canal as the shortest and fastest route compared to the Cape of Good Hope route”.

No specific timing of a return was offered by either CMA CGM or any of the companies that SCA has met with to date.

Whether the incentive of a 15% discount is going to be sufficient to accelerate decision making on timing, remains unclear.

“The extent to which a Suez Canal transit discount in the order of 12%-15% is enough to tip the balance and persuade shipowners to resume transits through the Red Sea is difficult to say. Individual shipowners and crews will have their own risk acceptance levels,” said BIMCO chief security and safety officer Jakob Larsen.

Shipping companies are said to be closely monitoring developments in the Red Sea and are feeding these observations into their risk assessments, but a full return from container lines remains unlikely in the short term.

Last week Maersk confirmed that it was not ready to send ships through the Red Sea, despite the announcement of a ceasefire between the US and Houthi militia in Yemen.

Regardless of the security assessment, such a move would require an expensive and complex redeployment of ships just at the point that lines are trying to deal with the impact of US tariffs.

“Going through something as complex, costly and hard to reverse as a complete redeployment of our shipping networks to go back through the Red Sea — based on a news of a deal whose contours we don’t understand, whose terms we don’t understand, and [which] has been breached already — I think is not responsible,” chief executive Vincent Clerc told an earnings call last week.

The SCA, meanwhile, continues to amplify its pitch to industry officials as it tries to convince owners to accelerate their return to the canal.

In a read out from Rabie’s latest meetings with the Italian ambassador, he stressed that the Suez Canal Authority is adopting “an ambitious strategy to develop and modernise the system of maritime and logistics services provided to its customers, and is seeking to open up partnerships with major international companies in various maritime fields”.

Revenue from the Suez Canal had plummeted by about 60% last year from a historic high of $10.3bn (€9.1bn) in 2023 to just under $4bn (€3.5bn) in 2024.