Due to the rapid changes in world trade and shipping environment, today's ports face ever-increasing competition, from adjacent competing ports. To this reason, port service quality has been recognized as an important strategy to take competitive advantage for those competition. In general, service quality has effect on customer loyalty, and customer loyalty is the resource to sustain competitive advantage which service providers or service producers. By improving customer loyalty, companies can get more benefits and added value. However, this causality qf port service quality has not been clearly identified. Thus, various empirical studies in relation to port service quality are needed. The aim of this study is to analyze the effect of perceived port service quality on customer satisfaction and loyalty. To achieve this aim, we established 8 hypotheses based on SERVPERF in order to test correlations of 5 dimensions of port service, port service quality, customer satisfaction, and customer loyalty. From the result of the hypothesis testing, we found that customer satisfaction and port service quality do not affect customer loyalty in spite of high effect of port service on customer satisfaction.

This exploratory study aims to investigate issues that, according to the Nonaka's theoretical model, are believed to hold significant ramifications on the effectiveness of creating and sharing organizational knowledge among distributed workers. These include changes in accessibility of knowledge with different levels of implicity, and the choice of communication media as a knowledge management channel. Related data were gathered from distributed-workers in Japan through interviews and a survey questionnaire. Data analysis revealed changes in the dynamics of internal and external interactivity, in the accessibility of necessary knowledge, and in the reliance on electronic media for knowledge exchange. The findings' implications are discussed from the perspective of knowledge creation ana sharing, and further suggestions have been made for the direction of future research efforts.

Since the beginning of open-door policy, China has been making rapid annual growth with an average 10% economic development. And due to this rapid growth, cargo volumes via ports have been also rapidly increased, and accordingly, current China government has intensively invested in port development. Further, this development project is significantly big scale, compared with those project which Korea and Japan have. Thus, China is beginning to threaten Korean ports, especially Busan port which try to be a hub port in Northeast Asia. For this reason, it has been very important issue for Korea and Busan port to investigate or analyze Chinese ports based on empirical data. Especially, although various studies related to Shanghai and Hong Kong have been conducted, the competitiveness of overall Chinese major ports has been little studied. In this paper, we analyzed competitiveness level of eight Chinese ports with capabilities as container terminal, based on reliable sources. From data analysis, eight Chinese ports were classified into four groups according to competitiveness level. Rankings among four clusters based on competitiveness level are cluster(Hone Kong), cluster C(Shanghai), cluster A(Qingdao, Tianjin, and Yantian) and cluster D(Dalian, Shekou, and Xiamen).