Exploring strategies for growth of the Aceh port system: A conceptual framework

• Main Authors: Subhan, Muhammad, Abdul Ghani, Ahmad Bashawir
• Format: Conference or Workshop Item
• Language: English
• Published: 2008
• Subjects: HE Transportation and Communications
• Online Access: http://repo.uum.edu.my/4684/1/Muh.pdf; http://repo.uum.edu.my/4684/; http://www.icis.uum.edu.my/

Devising and formulating strategies for growth have become a crucial of any firm's strategic management activity including ports to achieve and sustain growth and competitive advantage. Aceh ports, located at the world busiest shipping lane of the straits of Malacca, have almost all advantages to grow to become major ports in the region but unfortunately, in fact, the ports have been experiencing problems to grow for many decades. This might be, according to the literature, due to many ports have problems of ill-formulated and poorly implemented strategies set in place and of unclear mechanisms of port growth, or facing the dilemma of that they don't have enough variety and enough testing in their strategies or they just simply experience what is labeled as strategy decay. In this paper, we attempt to explore how a port grow, identify sources and factors that contributing to port growth, and to formulate relevant and unique strategies for growth. The paper focuses on the business aspects rather than the political side.This paper demonstrates that in order to achieve and sustain growth, Aceh port system should employ various strategies and each of those strategies has its own stages of application by taking into account the level of competitiveness of the industry.The paper comes out with a concept of growth strategies for a port system and sustained competitive advantage that might be applied for Aceh ports and other ports system.