New Business Segmentation for Haulage Industry in Malaysia

Abstract

The haulage industry has the biggest fleets as compared to the others road trucking operators in Malaysia.  The history of haulage industry started in 1971 until 2004 with five operators and in 2019 and above was recorded to 220 operators in the market. It was demonstrated with the open market which the growth of total fleet from 2,131 prime movers and 10,701 trailers before 2004 and more than 4,500 over prime movers and 31,500 over trailers in 2018 (AMH, 2018). The total number of prime movers and trailers had increased to 111% to overall fleets’ capacity. Haulage market which relate to container throughputs form 2009 - 2019 (ten-year) recorded at 16 million tues to 25 million teus in 2019 (UNCTAD 2019) which increased only by 65%. It was calculated on the surplus by 46 % of holding of prime movers in haulage industry at present. Apparently the market of haulage industry has stagnant and invite further sluggishness on haulage movements. The haulage operators had initiated to downsizing on the fleets due to unstable market and difficulty to sustain in their business. Therefore, the research suggests on appropriate ways to improve on the present condition and making more competitiveness of haulage industry. This research will investigate into three (3) segmentations such as reduction number of fleets, improvement on present activities and changing on other types of trucking businesses. The key respondents of the survey were the haulage operators, customers, government agency and other stakeholders. The survey was conducted among 200 respondents and at the end only 170 answers were accepted. The research uses SPSS version 25 and PLS-SEM to analyze from the collected data. The finding of the research has suggested that the three segmentations are the most appropriate ways to improve the present condition in haulage industry.