| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣海洋大學 === 航運管理學系 === 102 === Liner shipping companies have been usually influenced by the fluctuation of international business cycle, and many large shipping companies’ revenues cannot support their operating costs when the ocean freight rate is low. Choosing different diversified strategies can make shipping companies succeed or fail. Using an appropriate diversification strategy can help shipping companies reduce their risk by regularly investing in various shipping related and non-related business. This study adopts the AHP and BNP techniques to investigate several ocean carriers’ viewpoints on the degree of importance of various factors influencing the successfulness of several diversification strategies.
Firstly, the author reviews literatures and summarizes current container shipping companies’ diversified development. Two major reasons are found important for ocean carriers to diversify their business operations, namely, performance improvement and risk reduction. Four diversification strategies are found from literatures which can be used by the ocean container carriers: backward vertical, forward vertical, related, and unrelated diversification strategies. Reviewing carrying capacity of the top 30 shipping companies, three clusters of carriers are grouped by the author: Huge carriers, Alliance carriers and Region/Feeder carriers. It is found ocean carriers are increasingly offering various door to door services by diversifying their business scope, and state-owned shipping companies have involved in special diversified business operations.
This empirical research results showed that respondents from the shipping industry and from academic institutions have different perception on the degree of importance of these diversification evaluation criteria and sub-criteria. However both groups perceive profitability as the most important sub-criteria. From all respondents’ viewpoints, the most important criterion is the performance improvement. The best diversification strategy perceived by all respondents is backwards diversification strategy.
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