Strategic groups in Taiwanese liner shipping

Abstract

Liner shipping is normally viewed as being oligopolistic in nature with firms competing on the basis of service offered. Since shipping services are easily copied by competitors, if shipping firms want to gain a competitive advantage, it is essential to identify the competitors' strategies. This paper uses the analytical concepts of strategic groups theory to explore the strategic differences in the Taiwanese (the Republic of China, ROC) shipping industry. Cluster analysis is used to classify shipping companies, shipping agencies and ocean freight forwarders into four strategic groups on the basis of the key strategic factors obtained from the factor analysis. The results of multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA), analysis of variance (ANOVA) and the Scheffe test showed that strategies among the strategic groups are significantly different.