The Core Competitiveness Of High-end Logistics Service Providers A Comparative Study

The trend of solely foreign-capital in logistics and freight forwarding business is on the rise in China mainly for the admittance requirements for such foreign enterprises entering into China's shipping , logistics and freight forwarding markets are loosen by Chinese government after China's entry into WTO, Which drive domestic business up against more fierce competitions. This paper, studying mainly on express-based advanced logistics service provider (LSP) and ocean-shipping-based advanced logistics service provider internationally .summarizes the core competences of such business and makes comparison with advanced LSPs domestically to find out the gap between domestic and international advanced LSPs with the hope that the suggestions and measures proposed in this paper will be beneficial for domestic businesses to face the international competition .The theory part of this paper includes the brief introduction of contemporary logistics such as the definition ,its characteristics and development strategy and supply chain management and Fourth Party Logistics (4PL) as its up-to-date outcome as well.This part also carefully studies on the types of logistics service especially the four types concluded herein and introduces the authoritative analysis model of logistics market and its contributions. Analysing types of LSP and studying on their competences of each kind plays a key role in this paper.The expatiation of core competences such as the definition, its characteristics, its structure and the shaping and developing mechanism of core competence is the basis in the core part of this paper, after which this paper highlights the study on the core competences of advanced LSP and its shaping and developing mechanism. In order to well compare with international advanced LSPs .this paper adopts the "The Fifth Logistics Market Research Report in China by Chiese Warehousing Association" as the supporting datum to clarify current developments of logistics in China for comparative study is the key in this paper. Summarizing the core competence from UPS and DHL as the examples of international express-based advanced LSP and Maersk and APL as the example of Ocean shipping-based advanced LSP and making comparative study on Sinotrans, Datian .China Shipping and COSCO as domestic counterparts respectively to find out the gap between domestic advanced LSPs and their international competitors. Suggestions and measures of enhancing the core competence of domestic advanced LSP are proposed accordingly in this paper.