South Korea's Port was managed as the central government-led system for a long period. But, in order to react to rapidly changing port environment and be more competitive edge in the increasing competition for a hub port in Northeast Asia, the need of more efficient port management and operation began to emerge. 'Korea Container Terminal Authority' was established in 1990, followed by Busan Port Authority in 2004, Inchon Port Authority in 2005, and Ulsan Port Authority in 2007.
These public enterprises are regarded as improving marketing operation, customer satisfaction and they plays important role raising status of the port in the overall assessment in comparison with the past port system under the government.
However, comparing to the port in the developed country, South Korea has short history of public enterprise for port management such as the Port Authority (PA) system. So Korea still has lack of the experience of the systemic performance management that reflect uniqueness of public enterprise.
In this paper, to evaluate the management performance of public port enterprises rationally, we prioritized evaluation factors. The derived factors were compared with the performance of public enterprise that have 50 or more employees such as Busan Port Authority, Incheon Port Authority, Korea Container Terminal Authority.
Survey was conducted with each agency staff, related agencies, academia, and experts. AHP(Analytic Hierarchy Process) was used to evaluate the management performance of public enterprises in terms of 'customers satisfaction factors', 'port management operations factors', 'port marketing factors', 'financial factors', 'organization and management factors' in order of priority.
The result shows the role of public port management is changing from 'the simple port management' to 'providing more convenient and efficient service for the nation'.
In survey results of comparing the performance of three agencies, Busan Port Authority, Incheon Port Authority, Korea Container Terminal Authority was positioned in order; it is opposite result from the management assessment of the government. It shows that more diverse perspectives and performance management system that is possible to reflect the uniqueness of the separate institutes are necessary to evaluate the performance of the public enterprise reasonably.