Railways, Airports and Sea Container Operators as Publicly Listed Companies – Financial Performance and Shareholder Value Creation Perspective

摘要

Logistics infrastructure and transportation services have been the liability of countriesand governments for decades, or these have been under strict regulation policies. Oneof the first branches opened for competition in EU as well as in other continents, hasbeen air transports (operators, like passenger and freight) and road transports. Thesehave resulted on lower costs, better connectivity and in most of the cases higherservice quality. However, quite large amount of other logistics related activities arestill directly (or indirectly) under governmental influence, e.g. railway infrastructure,road infrastructure, railway operations, airports, and sea ports. Due to theglobalization, governmental influence is not that necessary in this sector, sincetransportation needs have increased with much more significant phase as compared toeconomic growth. Also freight transportation needs do not correlate with passengerside, due to the reason that only small number of areas in the world have specializedin the production of particular goods. Therefore, in number of cases public-privatepartnership, or even privately owned companies operating in these sub-branches havebeen identified as beneficial for countries, customers and further economic growth.The objective of this research work is to shed more light on these kinds ofexperiments, especially in the relatively unknown sub-branches of logistics likerailways, airports and sea container transports. In this research work we have selectedcompanies having public listed status in some stock exchange, and have neededamount of financial scale to be considered as serious company rather than start-upphase venture.Our research results show that railways and airports usually need high fixedinvestments, but have showed in the last five years generally good financialperformance, both in terms of profitability and cash flow. In contrary to commonbelief of prosperity in globally growing container transports, sea vessel operators ofcontainers have not shown that impressive financial performance. Generally marginsin this business are thin, and profitability has been sacrificed in front of high growth –this also concerns cash flow performance, which has been lower too. However, as weexamine these three logistics sub-branches through shareholder value developmentangle during time period of 2002-2007, we were surprised to find out that all of thesethree have outperformed general stock market indexes in this period. More surprisingis the result that financially a bit less performing sea container transportation sectorshows highest shareholder value gain in the examination period. Thus, it should beremembered that provided analysis shows only limited picture, since e.g. dividendswere not taken into consideration in this research work. Therefore, e.g. US railwayoperators have disadvantage to other in the analysis, since they have been able toprovide dividends for shareholders in long period of time. Based on this researchwork we argue that investment on transportation/logistics sector seems to be safealternative, which yields with relatively low risk high gain. Although global economywould face smaller growth period, this sector seems to provide opportunities in moredemanding situation as well.