2014. The new canal was opened one year later in a ceremony attended by several international dignitaries including the then French President François Hollande. The New Suez Canal is expected to expand trade along the fastest shipping route between Europe and Asia. The new canal allows ships to sail in both directions at the same time. This decreases transit time from 18 to 11 hours for most ships. The expansion is expected to double the capacity of the Suez Canal from 49 to 97 ships a day. The New Suez Canal is long, including of dry digging, and of "expansion and deep digging" to provide a second shipping lane in the existing canal, allowing for separated passing of ships in opposite directions. It also includes the deepening and expansion of a section of the existing canal. The construction, which was scheduled to take three years, was instead ordered by the President to be completed in a year. The chairman of the Suez Canal Authority announced that the revenues from the Suez Canal (after the completion of the New Suez Canal) will jump from 5 billion dollars to 12.5 billion dollars annually. The Egyptian government said that these revenues will be used to transform the cities along the Canal (Ismaïlia, Suez, and Port Said) into international trading centers. The government has also said that many new projects in the Suez province are being studied as a result of enlarging the Suez Canal capacity, such as building a new industrial zone, fish farms, and the completion of the valley of technology (wadi al thechnologia). The project cost around 30 billion Egyptian pounds (approximately 4.2 billion dollars) and no foreign investors were allowed to invest in the project, but rather Egyptians were urged to participate in funding the project through bank certificates of deposit initially yielding 12%, later raised to 15.5%. The Egyptian Armed Forces participated in the project by helping in digging and designing the canal. The enlarged capacity allows ships to sail in both directions at the same time over much of the canal's length. Beforehand, much of the canal was only one shipping lane wide, with limited wider basins for passing. This is expected to decrease waiting time from 11 hours to 3 hours for most ships, and to increase the capacity of the Suez Canal from 49 to 97 ships a day. Progress Technical difficulties initially arose, such as