| Summary |
Hui-Huang Tai, 2006.12
Institute of Traffic and Transportation National Chiao Tung University
In recent years, the global ocean container transportation markets between East Asia and North America have maintained the highest market shares, and almost all major container carriers have continuously increased their fleet capacities in this district. Currently, many container carriers select Shanghai, Kaohsiung, Yantian and Hongkong as hub ports to deploy trunk routes. Due to the overlap in cargo-sources and route-deployment, competitions do obviously exist among those ports.
This dissertation includes three parts. Firstly, from the viewpoints of container carriers, to investigate major factors affecting hub ports selection, as well as to explore the causal relationships among these factors and the operational incentives to the carriers across Taiwan-strait. A questionnaire survey was conducted on the basis of extensive literature review, and the characteristics of shipping operation in those hub ports. Factors analysis was then used to identify major influential factors of port selection and operational incentives to the liners. Moreover, a Structural Equations Modeling (SEM) approach was used to examine the relationships among influential factors of port selection; including internal and external factors of port, and operational strategy of container carriers, and the operational incentives, such as expanding the market, increasing revenue, cost-saving of liners, etc.. Results indicate that operational strategy of container carriers has direct impacts on cost-saving of liners and is positively correlated with the external factors of hub-port. In addition, external factors have positive impacts on expanding market and increasing revenue of container carriers.
In the second part, a second questionnaire survey was designed and conducted based on the three categories of major influential factors identified above to analyze and evaluate relative competitive advantages and port competitiveness among those hub ports. Grey Relational Analysis (GRA) was used to evaluate the relative port competitive advantages based on those factors. Moreover, Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), Entropy and Compromised Weighting Method were utilized to obtain the weights of the three major factors for evaluating and comparing the competitiveness among those hub ports. Results show that in terms of internal factors, Yantian possess the best competitive advantage, whereas Shanghai possess best competitive advantages on both external factors and operational strategy of container carriers, which is also ranked as the port with the highest competitiveness.
Furthermore, in order to explore the impact of influence factors on hub port competitiveness from the operational viewpoints of carriers, the third part of this dissertation adopts the GM(1,1) of Grey Theory to predict future throughput of the four hub ports under three different scenarios, and the GRA method to estimate weights of influential factors on port competitiveness. The results of conservative scenarios reveal that the growth of container cargos in 2010 would be the highest in Shanghai, and Yantain would handle more container cargos than Hongkong. In the meantime, there would be about 10 million TEU in Kaohsiung which approximated to the figure the Ministry of Communications in Taiwan anticipated. The container volume of ports is an indicator of cargo-source in the hinterland, and an attracting factor for container carriers on port-selection and route-deployment. So, the average growth rate of past and future volume is taken as an indicator of cargo-source. Results indicate that cargo-source is the most influential factor with the highest weight while the infrastructure of port internal factors is less significant on hub-port competitiveness with the lowest weight for container carriers. It shows that good internal factors are the basic required conditions for the selection of hub-ports.
In conclusion, the external factors of hub ports are the most significant influential elements on port competitiveness and carriers’ selection, followed by operational strategies and internal factors. Finally, suggestions are proposed and discussed for the enhancement of the competitiveness in Kaohsiung. |
