Shipyard Selection in International Container Shipping: Assessing Critical Factors Through AHP

Abstract

Shipyard selection has been attributed traditionally to a small number of commonly accepted criteria. Sourcing the latter from a literature survey among works discussing shipyard selection in relation to new-buildings, ship-repair and maintenance work on ships, the paper explores the relevance of existing and proposed related criteria through a round of interviews among brokers in two countries: Taiwan and Greece. Following the processing of a short relevant questionnaire, they proceeded to a validation of the importance of retained criteria and then to an estimation of their relevant weights in the context of an AHP methodology. Evaluation data were sourced from AHP questionnaires distributed to companies in the two respective countries which either own or manage container ships and operate container lines through owned/managed tonnage. On the basis of revealed AHP weights and observed differences, the authors discuss the impact of different types of tonnage employment and of operation and management styles on the importance that different criteria were revealed to have for the selection of a shipyard by container shipping investors. The paper is structured as follows: After an introduction to the research interest of the subject, Section 2 sets the shipbuilding industry current context Section 3 reviews the related literature focusing also on the pressures on the container industry which serve as a context for the shipyard selection process; Section 4 presents and discusses the AHP results on the basis of the questionnaire survey and Section 5 concludes, suggesting also directions for further research.