CAIRO, July 4 (Xinhua) -- Egypt's Suez Canal revenues fell to 5.72 billion U.S. dollars in the fiscal year 2019-2020 from 5.75 billion dollars in the previous year, the Suez Canal Authority (SCA) said in a statement on Saturday.
Egypt's fiscal year ends in June.
The statement attributed the decline to "the reduction in the world trade movement by 18.5 percent in the second quarter of 2020 and retreat in the international economies besides the impacts of COVID-19 on the water transportation market."
Meanwhile, Osama Rabie, SCA's chairman, highlighted that "the navigation statistics index for the first quarter of 2020 is positive."
The Suez authority managed to deal with the COVID-19 crisis and maintained the normal rates of the crossing ships, he noted.
Rabie added that "9,545 ships, carrying 587.6 million tons of goods, crossed the waterway from January-June, compared with 9,114 ships carrying 585.1 million tons of goods in the same period of 2019."
The canal, one of Egypt's main sources of national income and foreign currency revenues, is the fastest shipping route between Africa, Europe, and Asia by bridging the Red Sea and the Mediterranean Sea. Enditem
