The Panama Canal has shaken off drought restrictions and posted record revenue in fiscal 2026, while transits on Russia’s Northern Sea Route have already exceeded last year’s record. Ships are returning to the Red Sea and Suez route, but the recovery is uneven.
South Korea’s Chosun Ilbo examined changes at the world’s key maritime gateways in a feature titled ‘From Panama to the Arctic... the world logistics map is changing.’ Climate, conflict and great-power competition are combining to redraw the routes ships take. This article sets out the trend using recent figures that can be confirmed from public data.
광고 문의 · 300×250Panama Canal rebounds from drought to record revenue
According to the Panama Canal Authority (ACP), transits in fiscal 2026 (October 2025 to September 2026) totaled 13,951, up 4.1 percent from a year earlier. Tonnage rose 6.5 percent to 521 million PC/UMS tons, and revenue rose 16.6 percent to a record 6.6 billion balboas (unaudited). Most of the increase came from energy carriers and containerships.
The canal, which once restricted transits because of drought, kept a maximum draft of 50 feet throughout this dry season. With rainfall in the watershed near average, last-minute reservations for the Panamax locks were reinstated. The authority is pursuing the Río Indio reservoir project under its Vision 2025-2035 plan, and Administrator Ilya Espino de Marotta stressed that the canal facilitates, rather than restricts, international maritime trade.
104 Arctic transits, already above last year
According to gCaptain, citing data from the Centre for High North Logistics (CHNL), there were 104 commercial transits of Russia’s Northern Sea Route (NSR) through September 30 this year, already above the 103 for all of 2025. Cargo rose 15 percent to about 3.7 million tons, and CHNL projects about 150 transits for the full season.
Container transits rose to 13, four of them international Asia-Europe voyages, compared with one last year. South Korea’s Panstar Acro sailed from Korea to the United Kingdom, and ships from China also called at Felixstowe. Atomflot, Russia’s nuclear icebreaker operator, expects total NSR cargo to exceed 40 million tons for the first time this year.
Still, around 150 transits a year falls far short of a single month of Suez Canal traffic. Lloyd’s List reported that record Arctic containership traffic has not changed the opposition of big carriers, and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace argued that international demand for the route is unlikely to last. Russia and China aim for 20 million tons of bilateral NSR cargo by 2030.
Red Sea and Suez: a return, but an uneven one
According to Lloyd’s List Intelligence, Suez Canal transits in September totaled 1,228, up 21 percent year-on-year but still 39 percent below pre-Houthi-crisis levels. As containerships abandoned the Cape of Good Hope diversion, container volume through Suez rose 40 percent month-on-month to 2.19 million TEU in September, compared with 5.9 million TEU in September 2023.
Risks remain, however: on the 7th of this month a containership operated by Chinese carrier CU Lines was fired upon off Yemen, though all crew were safe. With water in Panama, ice in the Arctic and security in the Red Sea all shifting at once, the global logistics map can no longer be explained by the recovery of any single route.
