The News
Maersk is sending its India-US East Coast service back through the Suez Canal, cutting about a week off each westbound sailing. On the new route, a container leaving Nhava Sheva reaches Savannah in 28 days. That puts Indian cargo in Savannah 10 to 14 days sooner than when ships sailed around Africa, Georgia Ports Authority said.
It is Maersk’s second attempt on this service this year. The loop, called MECL, first switched to Suez in January, but Maersk sent it back around the Cape of Good Hope on March 1 as fighting in the Middle East escalated. This time, CMA CGM and MSC are following, each moving an India-East Coast service onto the canal.
Why It Matters
For importers of Indian goods, the shorter route changes three things they plan around.
Lead times and safety stock: Maersk’s westbound sailings are seven days shorter than on the Cape route, and Georgia Ports puts the gain into Savannah at 10 to 14 days. When Maersk moved MECL back around Africa in March, the longer Cape transit times came back with it.
Port of entry: The Suez services call the East Coast directly, from Newark down to Savannah and across to Houston. Georgia Ports handled 22% of India’s containerized East Coast trade in fiscal 2025, by its own count.
Rates: Freight rates from India and Sri Lanka to the East Coast are up 230% from a year ago, according to forwarder WOWL’s September update. A shorter route needs fewer ships, but FreightWaves reports the Suez return is unlikely on its own to bring near-term relief on US trades. Relief is more likely next year, because Bimco expects the freed ships, on top of 9% fleet growth, to weaken the market in 2027.
Georgia Ports’ commercial chief Flavio Batista tied the shorter route to the shift in sourcing toward South Asia. Importers “will be able to enjoy the full benefit of that manufacturing shift with shorter lead times and a more predictable supply chain,” he said. Still, the same route change was reversed once already this year.
Know More
Each of the three carriers is handling the return differently.
Maersk: MECL’s first westbound Suez sailing, the Maersk Denver, reached Savannah in August. Maersk says westbound voyages now run seven days shorter and eastbound voyages 14 days shorter, with a new call at Jeddah.
CMA CGM: INDAMEX, which runs from India and Pakistan to the East Coast, is being moved back to Suez. The switch cuts five days off Nhava Sheva to Savannah and lets CMA CGM keep a weekly sailing with two fewer ships, per Georgia Ports.
MSC: Its Indusa service is sending only westbound cargo through Suez, while eastbound sailings stay on the Cape. The first westbound sailing, the MSC Domna X, left Colombo this week.
Maersk’s loop also stays out of the Persian Gulf. Its ports run from Charleston, Savannah, Houston, Norfolk and Newark to Tangier, Jeddah and Salalah, then to Mundra, Pipavav and Nhava Sheva on India’s west coast. So a ship on the rotation crosses Bab el-Mandeb at the south end of the Red Sea but never enters the Strait of Hormuz, where three ships were hit in three days this week.
Container traffic on the canal is only starting to come back, though. In the latest full week of data, 84 container ships sailed through Suez, the most in a week since the attacks began, while 120 still went around the Cape, according to IMF PortWatch. Before the attacks, in 2023, about 137 container ships a week used the canal.
Last Time
CMA CGM moved first in January, when the CMA CGM Verdi sailed a full INDAMEX loop from Karachi to New York through the canal. The Suez routing cut the round trip by two weeks, to 77 days, per Xeneta. Maersk followed with MECL later that month, but the run ended within about six weeks.
On March 1, Maersk paused its Suez sailings through Bab el-Mandeb, sent MECL and its ME11 service around the Cape, and suspended all its crossings of Hormuz. At the time, it said it would put both services back on Suez once security conditions allowed, which is the step it has now taken.
Pushback
Several facts cut against counting on the shorter transit.
The Strait: Houthi forces took the port town of Mocha and Perim Island, which sits inside Bab el-Mandeb, in the middle of this month, giving them control of the Yemeni side of the Strait. Every ship on these three services passes through it, yet MSC’s partial restart came four days later.
Reliability: Global schedule reliability fell to 56.4% in July, the lowest of 2026, with late ships arriving an average of 6.06 days behind, per Sea-Intelligence. So, a 28-day transit is the published timetable, not a guaranteed arrival.
Canal fees: The Suez Canal Authority dropped its 15% transit-fee discount for the largest ships in April, even though the rebate had been introduced in 2025 to win container lines back.
The holdouts: ONE, HMM, Yang Ming and Evergreen are still sending their ships around the Cape.
What’s Next
The test is whether MECL lasts longer on Suez than the six weeks it managed last time. Maersk says it has “contingency plans in place” to move the service back around the Cape if the security situation changes.
