Strategic Opportunity Identification Of Railway Freight Transport Under The Background Of Industrial Transfer

Railway transportation is crucial to the transportation in China, especially in the field of mass freight transportation. In recent years, the railway in China has developed greatly, while the amount of railway transportation is little, in contrast to other ways of transportation such as water and highway. This phenomenon is partly because of the cargoes that the railway is dealing with, while it also ascribe to the defects in operation system.As a child of railway staff, the writer has always been paying great attention to the transformation and development of railway transportation system. At the same time, as an entrepreneur looking for the business opportunity brought by transformation, the writer believes that the transformation of the railway transportation is arousing great business opportunities. Therefore, the writer chooses the transformation of railway transportation as the subject and raises his own opinion regarding two problems:the direction and path of transformation in railway transportation and development strategy of private railway agent companies.Firstly, the essay analyzes the present situation about railway transportation based on literatures home and abroad and interviews with authorities. Michael Porter’s Five Forces Model was used in the analysis. The essay concludes two basic contradictions in the railway transportation system, which are:1) The contradiction between the idleness of transportation capability and the great demand for transportation.2) The contradiction between the business mode of mass freight transportation and the demand for efficiency in less-than-carload freight transportation.Secondly, the essay describes the circumstance and the reasons for the industrial re-location in China. After that, it targets the clients using STP, and emphasizes the reason why industrial re-location leads to great opportunities for railway transportation as well as the gap between the circumstance now and the demand of that opportunity.Both those two major contradictions of railway transportation system and the opportunities aroused by industrial re-location require a transformation of railway transportation from what it is to modern logistics as soon as possible. The necessity and feasibility of the transformation of railway transportation are expounded and the important conclusion is given out that the transformation is actually the transformation from transport contractor to the supplier for third party logistics. Going a step further, the breakthrough point of transformation is intensifying the integration of containers into multimodal transport logistics, and through this advanced mode of logistics, promoting the revolution and transformation in different segments of railway transportation.At last, looking into the problem in microcosm, theories of entrepreneurial opportunity identification and dynamic competition were used to discuss the positioning and strategy of competition for a private-owned railway agency company. Opinions were raised in the essay that after a private-owned railway agency company has fulfilled its target of being a successful functional third-party railway agent enterprise, it doesn’t necessarily need to develop itself into a full-range logistics agency that covers diversified means of transportation. Another way is to bouncing into a supplier of fourth-party logistics services and realizing the upgrade and transformation successfully.