부산대학교 도서관

A successful company must have a comprehensive financial and investment plan, and the market growth rate is also an important information for the company to formulate its future development strategies. Although rapid growth may help a company gain larger market share, on the other hand, the rapid growth may also exhaust most of a company's resources, which will probably result in financial distress or bankruptcy. With the slow growth, a company may not fully utilize its resources and it will also miss the opportunity to enlarge its scale and benefits. In view of sustainable growth, both excessive growth and slow growth will not lead to a company continuing future development. A company has to balance its strategic plan between rapid and slow growth rates, whereas, the optimal solution is to derive its suitable growth rate to make decisions for future investment and capital budgeting. The growth in container demand did not have a positive impact on freight rates. The container transportation market has been a very competitive market throughout recent years, with freight rates remaining volatile and struggling to rise. Overcapacity leads to low freight rates and low returns with which carriers had to struggle throughout these years. Furthermore, large liner companies ordered extra-large size container ships to reduce their unit-operating cost by achieving economies of scale. Large container ship deployment strategy may not work well for all companies and careless, excessive capital investment may lead the poor companies to move toward bankruptcy. To help liner shipping companies grow in a more effectively way, this paper investigates three major liner companies in Taiwan, Evergreen Marine Corp., Yang Ming Marine Transport Corp. and Wan Hai Lines Ltd. and the authors have applied sustainable growth model (Higgins, 1977) to examine the sustainable growth rate (SGR) of these companies and to analyze their development strategies. While coordinating the growth rate with its financial resource condition, this research has proposed suitable development strategies to achieve sustainable growth for each of the three companies. The results show that the SGR model is effective and applicable. The proposed research approach contributes to the liner shipping industry in both academic theory development, regular business operations, and business strategy formulation.