The Study Of Port Competition-Based On The Shippers’ Choice

In recent years, China has increasingly faced fierce competition between container ports. Traditionally, the competition between ports mainly focuses on the cargo coming from their hinterland. While along with the rapid development of international multimodal transport, the maritime transport of containers and inland transport are tightly connected. The inland transportation is becoming more and more convenient too. Therefore, there are fewer and fewer restrictions for the shippers and they have more autonomy when selecting the export port. Thus the contest between the export ports for the inland cargo is becoming increasingly competitive.From the research of port enterprise competition, we can see that there is some limitation of the current study of port enterprise competition, which means that when the port making competition strategy, they only think from their own perspective and seldom think of the attractiveness of the port to the shippers, which equals the shippers’ preferences of selecting a port. Starting from the perspective of the shippers’choice of port, the paper adopts structural equation model to simulate port competition. It studies the influence factors of the attractiveness of the container ports to the shippers, and then analyzes the importance of the influence factors to the shippers’ decision-making.This paper attempts to use structure equation model (SEM) to study the competition between the container port enterprises. Firstly, it analyzes the main factors affecting port attractiveness. These factors will further influence the shippers’decision of choosing export container port. They are the determinant factors of port competition. Then we asked some experts to score these factors in affecting the port’s attractiveness and select the factors with high scores as an index system of influencing factors of the port competition. With this index system, we make up a structure equation model to simulate the port competition. With the data from the survey, we analyze the relationship between the influence factors and port attractiveness. This paper provides some reference for the port enterprise to improve their competitiveness and has good practical value.