The evaluation of financial performance for Taiwan container shipping companies by fuzzy TOPSIS

• Financial performances are respectively evaluated on considering all representative indices and separate categories.
• Comparing a company with competitors in finance can identify financial strength and weakness of the company.
• Although alternatives number is merely three in the problem, fuzzy TOPSIS can solve problems with many alternatives.

In this paper, financial performance of Taiwan container shipping companies are evaluated by fuzzy multi-criteria decision-making (FMCDM). In the evaluating problem, we first apply grey relation analysis to partition financial ratios into several clusters and find representative indices from the clusters. Then the representative indices are considered as evaluation criteria on financial performance assessment of Taiwan container shipping companies, and an FMCDM method called fuzzy technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (fuzzy TOPSIS) is utilized to evaluate financial performance. By fuzzy TOPSIS, financial performances of container shipping companies are ranked, and thus a container shipping company can realize its finance competitive strength and weakness between container shipping companies.