On November 5, Hellenic Shipping News carried Drewry's Red Sea diversion tracker: 53 container ship transits of the Suez Canal in the week ended November 1, up 130 percent on the same week of 2025, with 60 percent of Asia to Europe capacity now routed through Suez again. On November 3, The Loadstar reported that the remaining mainline carriers are scheduled to follow, with a full return expected by the first quarter of 2027, and that 1 Asia to Mediterranean loop will go from 16 ships via the Cape to 12 via Suez.
60 percent is the interesting number. It is not 0 and it is not 100. For the next few months the Asia to Europe network is 2 networks sharing 1 set of berths, and a terminal that plans for the average of them plans for neither.
Same ports, 2 arrival processes
Take an illustrative service whose Cape leg into Rotterdam is 10 days longer than its Suez leg. Before the switch, every call arrives on the Cape proforma. After the switch, every call arrives on the Suez proforma. In between, both are live: some loops have switched and some have not, and each switched loop carries a one-time compression as ships that left Asia on the long route are caught by ships that left later on the short one.
Mean transit falls, which everyone welcomes. Arrival variance rises, which few plan for. 2 cohorts land in the same weeks. The berth plan built on the old proformas is wrong for the new cohort, the one built on the new proformas is wrong for the old, and the yard holds both sets of boxes while the hinterland connections catch up. Kuehne+Nagel's port update of November 3 described post typhoon vessel bunching at Ningbo pushing waiting times to 3 and 4 days at individual terminals. A route transition produces the same mechanism, more slowly and across more ports.
Variance, not utilization, sets the queue
The queueing arithmetic is standard and unkind. Waiting time at a berth scales with a utilization term and with the variability of the arrival process. Hold utilization fixed and roughly double the variance of arrivals, and the expected queue roughly doubles. A terminal at 85 percent berth utilization can run acceptably with arrivals spread across the week and badly with the same ships bunched into 3 days.
A transition is a variance event. The schedule looks fuller than average for a few weeks as the compression passes through, then thinner as 16 ship loops become 12 ship loops. Neither state looks like the average, and the queue is governed by the state, not the average.
What a terminal planner does with this
Treat the transition as a dated disruption with a known shape. The first Suez transit of each loop is published. The compression each produces can be computed from the old and new proformas: which weeks will see 2 arrivals of the same service, which berths they contend for, which yard blocks they will occupy together.
Re-cut berth windows per service, not per ship. A window that was right for a Cape proforma is wrong by about 10 days for a Suez one, and holding the old window for a ship that now arrives early produces idle berth time followed by a queue.
Plan the thinning as well as the bunching. Fewer ships on a loop at the same weekly frequency means the string is more tightly coupled: a delay propagates faster around a 12 ship rotation than a 16 ship one, because there is less slack between calls. Buffers sized for the Cape network are the wrong size for the Suez network, in both directions.
The return to Suez is good news for transit times. It is good news for terminals only if they plan the months in which the network is 2 networks at once.