Nowadays, container transport services play a substantial role in global cargo transportation by serving as an intermodal between the exporter and importer. Container shipping has become increasingly important over the past few decades due to its obvious advantages. However, Vietnam's container market has shown severely ongoing competition among numerous domestic and foreign shipping lines resulting in serious consequences occurring such as the freight rates substantially decreasing within the last ten years. In fact, Vietnam's sea lanes have become more defensive to cover the losses of shipping companies. Selection of criteria for competitive evaluation of container transport companies is necessary to help recognize the problems within the enterprise especially relating to its position in the market and from here, business management are able to put strategic plans in place and reasonable policy in order to be able to survive and grow.

Currently, container transport services play a substantial role in global cargo transportation, by serving as an intermodal between exporter and importer. Container shipping has become increasingly important over the past few decades, due to obvious advantages. However, Vietnam's container market has shown severely ongoing competition among numerous domestic and foreign shipping lines, resulting in serious consequences occurring such as freight rates substantially decreasing within the last 10 years. Vietnam's sea lanes have become more defensive, to cover losses of shipping companies. Selection of criteria for competitive evaluation of container transport companies is necessary, to facilitate addressing the problems within the enterprise, especially relating to its position in the market and from here, business management can implement strategic plans and reasonable policy, to survive and grow.

Recently, brand equity is paid much attention in various industries. However, container liner shipping companies are still unfamiliar with this concept, and also the brand equity model has not been tested yet in shipping context. This study, therefore, aims to measure the relative importance of brand equity factors of container liner shipping companies by employing AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process). This study concludes that perceived quality, in particular cost-related service quality, is the most influential factor of brand equity, while weak support is found for brand association. In addition to this, group comparisons were conducted between shipping companies, freight forwarders and academics. The results will be useful as they firstly define brand equity and its role in shipping context, highlighting the significance of brand management to container liner shipping firms. This evaluation is not an end in itself, but will eventually be utilised as a tool to build competitive advantage which cannot be easily imitated by competitors.

This study aims at helping Chinese container liners keep constant competitiveness in the heated competition Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), a mathematics-based, multi-criteria decision analysis methodology is applied in the study to the performance evaluation on the three biggest Chinese container liners: COSCON, CSCL, and Sinolines. Through the final results of AHP model, we completely learn the current situation of Chinese liners, therefore they are able to enhance the competitive advantage from modifying operation strategy and competition strategy in accordance with the shipping market.