Northeast Asia is in the center of the world's 3rd largest market handling 36% of the world trade backed by high economic growth of China. At the same time, ports in the region fiercely compete with each other to become mega-hub port. International maritime & logistics environment is also changing rapidly with some trends such as vessels getting larger and a few carriers dominating market through M&A and Alliance. This new environment is creating demand for high added-value logistics space. Despite Busan Port's such advantages as main trunk route location and excellent feeder network, major Chinese ports, with their heavy local cargo volume, pose serious challenge to the position of Busan Port. Therefore Busan Port needs to make qualitative strategy to attract high added-value cargo as well as to timely develop infrastructure and to improve productivity.
In the future, Busan Port will need to make more efforts to enhance productivity by removing inefficient factors in equipment and operating system as well as to push ahead with cost-saving & service improvement strategy.
This paper carried out a theoretical inquiry into productivity of container terminal by means of examining various factors affecting terminal productivity and analyzing previous studies at home and abroad on measuring productivity. Based on that, gross berth productivity(GBP), throughput per berth length, throughput per employee, throughput per container yard were designated as basic productivity indicator of Busan Port container terminal. Other indicators proposed in other early papers were integrated into qualitative indicator called "productivity enhancement efforts". "Year-on-year GBP growth" was added as another indictor to encourage "late starter" to boost their productivity.
The objective in making indicator is to encourage productivity enhancement in domestic container terminals. Utilizing the indicators mentioned above, the paper compared Busan Port container terminal productivity within North Port
Productivity indicator is a very necessary tool to enhance terminal productivity because it helps figure out what factor determines productivity. Therefore, terminal operators need to change their negative view on productivity evaluation and take more proactive stance in managing productivity related data and in making use of evaluation result to their advantage.