French liner CMA CGM announced that they intend to resume journeys through the shorter Red Sea after Yemeni Houthi rebels signal a halt to maritime attacks.
Presently, the quantum of Suez transits remains at 50% of the level that prevailed two years ago, up until October 2023, when the Houthis commenced striking vessels transiting the Red Sea in retaliation for Israel’s war on Hamas in the Palestinian territories.
CMA CGM’s India Express intends to move through the Suez Canal on outbound & return trips between India & Pakistan, and the US east coast. This information is according to a schedule published on the company’s website. Accordingly, the first ship is expected to depart from Karachi next month, after the French group avoided making return journeys that had been sustained for many months.
Shipping organizations have largely avoided the Suez Canal for the past two consecutive years. They are now in the process of considering a return to this key trade route after the Houthis had indicated last month that they would end their campaign of sustained aggression, following the ceasefire in Gaza that came into effect in October 2025.
However, when clarifications were sought for this alert, CMA CGM declined to comment.
In November 2025, transits through the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait, which links the Red Sea with the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean, reflected their highest level in two years. This is according to Lloyd’s List Intelligence, though the number of trips remained nearly half the level of what prevailed two years ago, in October 2023. This period was when Houthis began striking vessels transiting the Red Sea after Israel responded with military aggression to Palestinian Hamas-initiated attacks on Israel.
Roughly a 10th of global seaborne trade volumes transited the shorter Red Sea shipping route. Clarkson Research disclosed that this was the prevailing scenario prior to the Houthi campaign. Many ships have been forced to opt for the conventional route, sailing around the southern tip of Africa. This longer route added weeks to journey time and, besides, ended in pushing up shipping prices.
Liner groups such as CMA CGM, which owns one of the world’s largest fleets of commercial container ships, have been directing a small quantum of their vessels to transit the Red Sea, with the support of naval escorts.
Ships originating from Europe tend to carry less cargo than the fully laden ships from Asia, as shared by maritime experts.
However, maritime analysts cautioned that CMA CGM’s shift did not necessarily indicate the entire shipping sector’s full-scale return to Red Sea transits. Head of advisory at maritime security group EOS Risk, Martin Kelly, believed that it boils down to individual shipping companies’ risk tolerance. Kelly added that some will see there haven’t been hostilities for weeks now, whereas others will see the situation is still likely to be too fragile to return to the Red Sea transit option.
A spokesman for the broker of war insurance for ships in March, Dylan Mortimer, had told the Financial Times that war risk insurance rates for the Red Sea had fallen about 70% when compared with prices at the peak of tensions that prevailed a year back in mid-2024.
However, head of marine & cargo at Marsh, Marcus Baker, was of the view that rates had begun to plateau & for prices to decline further, there was a need for a sustained period of price stability to initially materialize.
Danish Maersk, considered the world’s second- largest container shipping line, besides German Hapag-Lloyd, together operating the Gemini shipping alliance, was opting for a more cautious approach.
