Modern corporations aim to maximize not only shareholders’ wealth, but also stakeholders’ one. This strategy is reflected in the concept of sustainable management. There has been a growing recognition of the concept and many experts put a high value on the sustainable management activities as one of the most important assessment scales of corporate evaluation.
Domestically, the concept of sustainable management was introduced in 2003, since then, a growing number of companies have proclaimed ethics management or corporate social responsibility as one of their objectives and have periodically reviewed their achievements.
This paper reviews achievements of international shipping companies in terms of sustainable management. The introduction part of the study discusses the theoretical definitions of sustainable management and sustainable development
1. Customer satisfaction is significantly positively correlated with economic and ecological activities, but not related with social responsibility. This implies that customers to shipping companies are less likely aware of corporate social responsibility.
2. Customer satisfaction ultimately leads to improve corporate trust and this points out that shipping companies need to concentrate on customer-oriented management.
3. In conclusion, the shipping industry is not different from others with respect to sustainable management. In order to survive recent fierce competition, the industry as a whole needs to take its responsibility to the community where it belongs.
later part is a case study on sustainable management of international shipping companies.
Also, this paper includes an empirical study on the influence of sustainable management activities on the customer satisfaction and corporate trust through questionnaire survey and interview to international traders and freight forwarders.