Business Policy as a Factor of Increasing Competitiveness of Maritime Shipping Companies

Shipping companies carry out maritime transport on the most extensive transport trajectory - the sea, and to do that they use very expensive means of transport - the ships. They utilize various methods to transport various types of cargo, some expensive and some cheap, some in bulk and others packed. Regarding land transport the cargo is carried over long distances. The ships are provided with more or less skilled seamen of different nationalities who operate these ships more or less well. If everything in maritime transport were left to chance, it is very likely to expect that nowadays there wouldn't be more than a million seamen navigating on around 50.000 vessels carrying each year more than 7 billion tons of cargo all around the world. The reason why is that so is very simple; if shipping companies were not behaving in the planned, future oriented and global way, all necessary factors would hardly be interconnected to make maritime transport efficient ensuring growth and development. Or, would there likely be more cargo to be transported if maritime sector and shipping companies within it were better organized? Well organized and therefore relatively cheap maritime transport is a moving force of the world economy and world trade and the role of shipping companies is therein enormous and not easy at all. Shipping companies are facing a huge variety of problems daily, arising from technical, technological, organizational, legal and commercial changes. Solving these problems and fulfilling all standards and achieving the set purposes at the same time, can be efficient only if all of these are approached in a planned and systematic way. Planned and systematic approach is reflected in creating and implementation of detailed and well harmonized business policy with all its elements, i.e. with production, personnel, marketing, financial, ecological and developing policy, consequently the maritime market in order to survive, develop and be more successful than the competitors.