No mention was made of the possible increase in the value of the transit rights, but the issue hovered over the table of the meeting which yesterday saw the executives of the Suez Canal Authority, led by by President Osama Rabie, confront the Egyptian minister Finance Minister, Ahmed Kouchouk, and other senior officials of the Dicastery on Strategy to Increase State Revenues generated by ship traffic in the Suez Canal. There has been talk on the other hand, on the part of the Canal Authority, of the initiatives that the institution has in progress to diversify the sources of income transforming the channel into a regional platform of services logistics and a maritime industry attractor in Egypt.

A diversification of activities that the Suez Canal Authority has been in place for some time but which seems far from ensuring to the entity, and therefore to the State, sufficient revenue to fill the loss of revenue generated by maritime traffic in the canal that is caused by the long series of attacks on ships transiting the Sea Red and in the Gulf of Aden conducted since the end of last year by the Yemeni Houthi rebels. Although it is not among the main components of Egypt's gross domestic product, being with regard to the 2022-23 tax year, the thirteenth largest direct source of income with a contribution of 2.4% of the total in a fiscal year in which ship traffic in the canal was increased by +18%, the overall contribution of the Suez Canal to the Egyptian economy is much more relevant and so is even more so its strategic role as a crossroads of maritime traffic between East and West.

Rabie outlined the initiatives implemented by the Suez Canal Authority to offer ship maintenance and repair services to the global maritime industry that gravitates around the canal and to provide other maritime services, as well as the latest initiatives to establish infrastructures for nautical tourism in the region, highlighting the financial results achieved in these fields and explaining how to increase them further.

If in the 2023-24 tax year, which ended last June, ship traffic in the Suez Canal decreased by -22% 20,148 ships having transited, a drop that has been entirely produced in the second half of the year alone, the impact of the crisis in the Red Sea on ship traffic in the canal, and therefore on the current fiscal year, is destined to be very and yesterday's meeting was aimed precisely at assess what the effect of the crisis will be on the budget of the financial year 2024-25 and the next financial year.

Announcing the results of yesterday's meeting, the representatives of the two institutions participating in the meeting did not any mention of the hypothesis of an imminent increase in the price of the rights of a question which, however, seems impossible that it is not was examined during the discussion, given that all the Ongoing initiatives to diversify sources of income of the Canal Authority seem far from filling the gap loss of six billion dollars caused to the state coffers by the crisis in the Red Sea announced in recent days by the Minister Egyptian Minister of Foreign Affairs and Emigration, Badr Abdelatty ( of 4 November 2024).