Bus industry in R.O.K is facing a difficult period of profit loss, which is getting more widely spreaded as time passes by. K city is selected to find out the management problem of overall Korean bus industry and to suggest possible measures, one of which might be applied to find out the solution. This study is dealing with intra-urban buses, inter-city buses and rural buses, but excluding high speed express buses and town buses that are operating in a narrower boundary. The methodologies adopted for the research are 'field survey', 'statistical inference' and 'financial ratio comparison'.
The study found the structure of revenue and cost of the K city. Bus operating cost can be divided into fixed cost and variable cost
the former consists of labor cost, social & welfare cost, insurance cost, and the latter, fuel cost, maintenance cost and other miscellaneous cost. The study has revealed that the highest cost components are labor cost and fuel cost.
Transport cost has been increased continuously. Variable cost is increasing faster than fixed cost, and fuel cost shows the sharpest increase among variable costs. Fuel cost has been increasing by 13.4%~15.0% per annum.
This cost structure will take effect much more on inter-city buses, whose overall cost shall increase more rapidly due to higher increase rate of variable cost.
The study suggests M&A as an alternative for the solution of the ailing industry. M&A effect might be listed as follows:
① the improvement of excess bus capacity
② the restructure of labor force
③ the decrease of overhead costs
The implementation of the technique 'M&A' among the bus companies in the city has been simulated to find out the effect of the M&A of the bus industry.
The study has found that 20% reduce of the number of operating buses will accrue net profit, which means that the hypothesis tested can be accepted.