Roughly 12–15% of global trade, and a large share of the world’s oil and container traffic, normally passes through the Suez Canal. For Egypt it is both a point of national pride and a serious source of hard currency.
In the 2022–2023 fiscal year canal revenue hit a record of around $10 billion (Suez Canal Authority). Then came 2024. Attacks on shipping in the Red Sea pushed many of the world’s largest carriers to avoid the route entirely and sail the long way around Africa instead. Traffic and revenue fell sharply — canal income dropped to roughly $4 billion, a collapse of more than half, driven almost entirely by events outside Egypt’s borders.
It is a vivid lesson in how exposed a single chokepoint can be. A waterway dug in the 19th century and widened again in 2015 can earn a country billions — and can be emptied not by anything the country did, but by a security crisis a few hundred kilometres away.
The canal will recover as shipping patterns settle; it is too useful not to. But 2024 is a reminder that Egypt’s three great foreign-currency engines — the canal, tourism, and remittances — are all sensitive to a nervous world, which is exactly why the country keeps trying to build new ones.
Every figure here is real and cited, and where sources disagree we say so. You can query the same data yourself — try a SQL challenge or explore the datasets.