Efficiency Evaluation Research Of Iron Ore Terminals In China Mainland

Steel industry in our country develops rapidly, which leads to the huge growth of iron ore import volume. During the last ten years, compound annual growth rate of iron ore import volume is 27.08%, and compound annual growth rate of iron ore throughput of ports above designated size is 24.26%, both of which presents the trend of rapid grows. At the same time, the external dependence degree of iron ore in 2010 reaches 63%, and thus all the situation put the iron ore terminal in a tense challenge. The efficiency of iron ore terminals not only concerns of safety of iron ore import, but also concerns the future development planning of iron ore terminals in our country, so it is very necessary to evaluate the efficiency of iron terminals.On the basis of production frontier theory, the paper adopts Three-Stage DEA method to evaluate the efficiency of the main 12 iron ore terminals with 10 dwt berths during 2006-2010, which presents the whole development level of specialized iron ore terminals. The paper selected berth length, berth depth, yard area, the number of loading and unloading machine as the input index, and the iron ore throughput as the output index, and then analyzed the result.The paper concluded that the efficiency of selected iron ore terminals increased year by year, but still not DEA efficient, the top three efficient terminals are Qingdao, Shanghai, and Rizhao. The pure technical efficiency is relatively high, which indicates the management of the terminal is relatively efficient, the pure technical efficiency of Qingdao and Shanghai is 1. The scale efficiency is low, which is the main factor to affect the combined efficiency, and because of the increasing returns to scale, the scale of iron ore terminals need improve. And the efficiency evaluation not only can bring the iron ore terminal the operation strategy, but also offer the decision basis for terminal development planning.