Godskunders värderingar av faktorer som har betydelse på transportmarknaden

The purpose of this project was to determine the freight customers’ valuations that are im-portant to their choice of transport mode for long-distance freight transportation. The results are intended to form the basis for valuations of changes in the transport system and for fore-cast models. The purpose was to study the general valuations of certain quality factors that transportation buyers have regardless of the type of transportation. The study covered all transport modes and transportation systems. The method used was computer-assisted telephone interviews that were conducted by the author with slightly fewer than 100 transportation managers and a response frequency of 99%. After a few questions about the company and its transportation, a Stated Preferences survey (SP) was conducted with ranking and paired choices. SP means that it is possible to find out what the company wood choose in a hypothetical situation and where willingness to pay can be determined for different factors. The factors that were primarily investigated by means of paired choices were transportation cost, transportation time, frequency, and risk of delay. Several other factors were also investigated by means of ranking. The results show that transportation cost is a very important factor when choosing a carrier. Actual transportation in today’s transport systems is of high quality with few delays and little freight damage At the same time, the transportation market is subject to stiff competition, which is one of the reasons why transportation customers are sensitive to price. The thresh-old for switching carrier is on average a 3.8% lower price, even with everything else un-changed. The companies use many transportation companies. Almost all of them use more than one and over half use more than 10. The transportation buyers are prepared to pay in average 2% higher price for a 50% reduc-tion in environmental impact. Shorter transportation times and higher dispatch frequency are valued at very low levels. A short transportation time is on the other hand more important for high-value freight than for low-value freight. The transport managers’ apparent satisfac-tion with today’s transportation solutions may be due to production and transportation being adapted to each other as regards both transportation time and frequency. With today’s production, there is thus no reason to change the transportation system other than to wish that transportation were cheaper. This is also shown in the paired choice analy-sis. Price is thus clearly the most important factor, followed by the risk of delay not increas-ing and then shorter transportation time and greater frequency. Transportation buyers are re-nowned for their sensitivity to price and this is borne out by this study and others conducted in the past.QC 2010111