Liner shipping is normally viewed as being oligopolistic in naturewith firms competing on the basis of service offered. Since shippingservices are easily copied by competitors, if shipping firms want togain a competitive advantage, it is essential to identify thecompetitors' strategies. This paper uses the analytical concepts ofstrategic groups theory to explore the strategic differences in theTaiwanese (the Republic of China, ROC) shipping industry. Clusteranalysis is used to classify shipping companies, shipping agenciesand ocean freight forwar- ders into four strategic groups on thebasis of the key strategic factors obtained from the factor analysis.The results of multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA), analysisof variance (ANOVA) and the Scheffe test showed that strategies amongthe strategic groups are significantly different.
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