Competitive strategies and organisational performance of ship management companies in Singapore

• Main Authors: He, Xiu Li., Choy, Pei En., Ng, Adeline Xiang Min.
• Other Authors: Chew, David Ah Seng
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2008
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Maritime studies::Maritime management and business
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/12748
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Given the long history of the shipping industry, the independent ship management industry is comparatively young with its emergence dating approximately 40 years back in the late 1960s which Sletmo (1989) suggested as the shipping industry’s fourth wave. Today, there are eight ship management centres namely the United Kingdom, Germany, Hong Kong, United States of America, Greece, Singapore, Norway and Cyprus. The purpose of this report is to exhibit the results of our study on empirically examining the competitive strategy-performance relationship in the context of ship management companies in Singapore. We have explored a few competitive strategies in relation to this research project - Porter’s competitive strategies of cost advantage, differentiation and focus, customer orientation, competitor orientation and lastly, resource-based theory. The strategies adopted by ship management companies and their performances are gathered through interviews and surveys conducted during the research period. The competitive strategy-performance relationship is then analysed using the SPSS software. Our results show that there is no significant relationship between cost advantage and high performance although there may be a slightly positive relationship as indicated by the high performance group. There is a significant positive relationship between differentiation strategy and high performance and the same applies to the relationship between customer orientation and high performance. However, there is no significant relationship between competitor orientation and increased performance. Lastly, a significant positive relationship is recorded between resource-based competitive strategy and high performance. The strongest influences on performance are customer orientation and resourced-based strategy. From the findings obtained from interviews carried out with ship management companies, it was gathered that alliances are not common within the industry. Generally, a more active approach in pursuing any competitive strategy translates into improved organisational performance.