A Study On The Competitive Strategy Of Private Ship Service Company X

Ship service refers to the supply of various goods and materials,provide safety lifesaving inspection and ship agency services etc.for ships berthing at the port,so as to ensure the safe,reasonable and efficient operation of their transport activities at sea.Of pre-2004,the ship supply market of China’s ports has not been completely open to the outside world,ship services at country’s leading eight major ports were all undertaken by Ocean Shipping Supply Company and China Ocean Shipping Company designated by the government.With the deepening of the reform and opening up policy,the import and export trade has undergone an unprecedented development.Port production and operation like spring breeze,develop rapidly.Those two companies has been unable to meet the demand of the market.On January 1,2004 formally implemented the Port Law of the People’s Republic of China,specified enterprise who legally obtain the business license can provide ship service.With this policy,foreign well-known shipping service enterprise with many years of business history accelerate their investment in the major ports in China,at the same time,there arise of a large number of private shipping service company.However,the 2008 financial crisis slowed down the global economic growth.Shipping industry frustrated,the shrinkage of market demand has a serious impact on the operation of shipping service enterprises.Due to the short operation history,the majority of private shipping service company are small in scale,low in technical level and lack of industry experience.With the change of the market environment,the problems such as low threshold,disorder,low price and bad competition hidden in the rapidly growing market are gradually highlighted,many private ship service companies are facing operating difficulties or even go bankruptcy.X company is one of the typical members.Founded in Qinhuangdao in 1993,X company can only carry out ship services on a small scale due to policy restrictions.With the opening of the port service policy,a large number of branch offices,warehouses and engineering workshops were established in major ports across the main ports in China.In just a few years,Shanghai as the headquarter,with Qinhuangdao,Dalian,Qingdao,Tianjin,Zhoushan and Guangzhou as the radiation network,it becomes a comprehensive shipping service company that provides a variety of services such as safety service,ship spare parts supply,ship repair,offshore service,spares in transit and ship agency.However,due to the low competition threshold for ship store & provision supply which is X company’s main business,with the shrinking market demand,the intensification of market competition and the increase of business operating costs,X company’s overall cost leadership strategy in this service can hardly maintain the long-term development of the company.At the same time,its other types of services have not formed an advantage in the market due to the late start.Its overall competitiveness and profitability of the company are greatly affected.Therefore,the adjustment of X company’s competitive strategy is extremely urgent.By using the competitive strategy theory,several analysis tools,literature research method,case analysis method and on-the-spot investigation method,this paper systematically studied and analyzed X company.Firstly,the establishment and development background,service scope,business performance,long-term strategic target and development bottlenecks of X company are introduced.At the same time,X company’s resources and capabilities are analyzed to determine its core competitiveness.Secondly,through PEST model,it analyzes the macro environment of the ship service industry.Using Michael Porter’s five forces model to understand its industry competitive structure.Then,SWOT matrix analysis method is used to analyze the advantages,disadvantages,opportunities and threatern of X company faced.Through the competitive strategic feasibility analysis,it is concluded that X company should choose the differentiation strategy to achieve its long-term development.With its stable product and service quality,relatively complete infrastructure and service network,as well as its current scale advantage and customer resources,X company should focus on creating a "one-stop marine service" to differentiate its products and form its unique competitiveness.By optimizing the combination of its different services,enhancing the competitiveness of the products,building a one-to-one customer service mechanism with the customer as the center,improving on-site service quality,and moderate focusing on mdedium and large shipowners and ship management companies totally those four aspects as the suggestion.Considering the development history,scale,industry influence and other aspects,X company is a typical representative of private ship service enterprises.Through the research,adjustment and implementation of its competitive strategy,X company can effectively cause other private marine service companies to pay more attention to their competitive strategy as well.By referring this analysis method,other companies will do some thinking & adjustment of their stategy,so to improve the industry competition environment & to avoid homogeneous low-price competition.With the change of industry competition situation and market environment,in order to find a long-term development path between foreign-funded ship service companies with a long history and standardized management and state-owned ship supply enterprises which still protected by some policies,the research of enterprise competition strategy has a great significance for private ship service companies.