Bombardier joint venture in China wins $453M rail car deal
Bombardier Inc’s Chinese joint venture said on Thursday it had won a US$453-million contract to supply 168 high-speed train cars to state-owned China Railway Corp (CRC), making it the second order win this year for China’s growing high-speed network.
The Chinese joint venture, Bombardier Sifang (Qingdao) Transportation Ltd (BST), launched in 1998, is 50 per cent owned by Chinese locomotive firm CRRC Sifang Locomotive & Rolling Stock Co Ltd.
In September, CRC awarded the joint venture a contract worth US$324 million to supply 120 train cars by the end of this year.
Bombardier’s Berlin-based transportation unit has six joint ventures in China, seven wholly foreign-owned enterprises and more than 7,000 staff, the company said in a statement. Together, the joint ventures have delivered more than 4,000 railway passenger cars, 580 electric locomotives and over 2,500 metro cars, Monorail, APM (Automated People Mover), and trams to China’s growing urban mass-transit markets.
The win for the Montreal firm comes one day after it won one major deal, and lost another. The manufacturer, with a factory in La Pocatière, Que., won a $894-million deal Wednesday to supply rail cars for New Jersey Transit, a project with the potential to balloon to $3.6 billion based on options for additional equipment. However, the company said it was “astonishing ” to lose a $989-million contract to provide locomotives and passenger cars to Via Rail, which awarded the business to Siemens AG.
The deal in China also occurs in the middle of escalating diplomatic tension between Beijing and Canada, resulting in China detaining two Canadians this weeks on allegations they harmed state security.
The dispute started after China reacted angrily to Canada’s arrest on Dec. 1 of Chinese executive Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of Huawei Technologies, at the request of the U.S. Meng was released on bail on Tuesday.
Bombardier representatives were not immediately available to comment on whether the dispute has affected their dealings in China.