Bombardier joint venture in China wins US$453M rail car deal

Bombardier Inc.’s Chinese joint venture said Thursday it has won a Us$453-million contract to supply 168 highspeed train cars to stateowned China Railway Corp. (CRC), 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 Berlinbased transportation unit has six joint ventures in China, seven wholly foreignowned enterprises and more than 7,000 employees, 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 Montrealbased Bombardier comes one day after it won one major deal, and lost another.

The manufacturer, with a factory in La Pocatière, Que., won an $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” it lost 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 Ottawa, 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, chief financial officer of Huawei Technologies, at the request of the United States. 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.