CNR Changchun Railway Vehicles Co Ltd, China's largest producer of rolling stock and urban rail cars, aims to double its annual export revenue to $1 billion within five years, General Manager Lu Xiwei told China Daily on Wednesday.

Located in Changchun, the capital of Jilin province, CNR Changchun is a subsidiary of China CNR Corp Ltd, the country's second-largest train producer.

Its product range includes high-speed rail cars and subways.

Exports will generate 30 percent of revenue in the next five years, according to the company.

CNR Changchun "is now strongly competitive in production and manufacturing technology in the international market, and our next step is to make greater efforts to explore foreign markets to maintain good momentum for exports," Lu said.

In April, the company signed a contract with Bangladesh to supply traction inverters and network control systems for diesel railcar trains.

The deal is seen as a signal of China's progress in exporting core rail technology.

Amid a weak world economy, many countries are eager to attract foreign investment to establish joint ventures in their local markets. These ventures are especially attractive when recipient countries can obtain advanced technology and promote local employment.

Lu said the company is researching the feasibility of exporting technology to, and localizing production in, South America, South Africa and Southeast Asia.

"Exports of intangible assets, including capital and technology, could yield higher profits than just exporting finished products, Lu said.

"We have realized that it's very difficult to develop in foreign markets only through product exports, so the trend will be a shift from product exports to technology and capital," Lu said.

Establishing joint ventures in foreign markets helps obtain orders in those markets, Lu said.

CNR Changchun has joint ventures in Iran and Australia that design and produce rail and subway cars.

Taking into consideration the operating risks, locally manufactured products "will be priced higher than those exported", Lu said.

Zhou Chuanhe, deputy general manager for overseas operations, said the company's market share in the industry will grow significantly as it establishes factories overseas.

"We will gradually tap into the high-end markets, as we mature in terms of technology, output and management in foreign markets," Zhou said.

"As China's rolling stock industry develops, Chinese products will account for 30 percent of the global market, competing with other industrial giants including Siemens and Alstom," Lu said.

CNR Changchun's exports now account for 65 percent of the nation's rolling stock exports, with more than 4,000 rail cars so far shipped to countries including Brazil, Australia and Thailand.
 

Zhonghong Holding Co Ltd, announced on Wednesday night that the company has won the competitive bidding for the Ruyi Island tourism project, located in Haikou, Hainan province. Zhonghong will join China Railway Group Ltd to provide 3 billion yuan ($474 million) for the project, Securities Daily reported Thursday.

According to the report, Zhonghong has agreed to form a joint venture with China Railway Group to bid for the artificial fill island project on May 11. Zhonghong and China Railway hold 45 percent and 55 percent of the common shares respectively.

The sea area (the formation of the land area) of the project is 6.12 square kilometers with a turnover of 3 billion yuan. The trading service fee is 9.38 million yuan.

Tthe Ruyi Island tourism project is about 17 km away from Meilan international airport and about 12 km away from the downtown of Haikou, said the report.

With the initial investment of no less than 1.6 billion yuan for land building, the Ruyi Island project will be built as an environmentally friendly and high-end tourism resort for fashion, leisure and sports..

Industrial insiders pointed out that the co-operation between Zhonghong and China Railway will also be conducive to the development of their travel real estate business.
 

Chinese Ambassador to Kyrgyzstan Wang Kaiwen May 25 said his country is not insisting on construction of the proposed China-Kyrgyzstan railway, media reported.

All international projects depend on providing mutual advantage, he said, according to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, which quoted the People’s Daily (China).

“If (Kyrgyz) society isn’t ready for it, then we won’t touch it,” he said, noting that some Kyrgyz want the railway built as soon as possible, while others fear it will facilitate Chinese expansion. However, the railway, if built, will benefit the entire global economy, he added.

Some unresolved questions regard track width and financing, Wang said.

After three year wait, China Railway Construction Corporation Limited recently won permission to launch a major copper mining project in Ecuador.

The production agreement signed April 25 by Ecuador’s government and Corriente Resources, a Canadian company jointly controlled by state owned CRCC and the Chinese state mining giant Tongling Nonferrous Metals Group Holdings Company Limited clears the way for digging to begin at the Mirador pit.

The deal first proposed in 2009 also marks the latest milestone in a quest by CRCC and other Chinese engineering firms to expand beyond domestic construction businesses by investing in mines around the world.

CRCC’s main, state owned competitor China Railway Group Limited HK:390 +0.65% CN:601390 -1.04% CRWOF +2.70% , declared in Q1 2012 financial report that it invested more than CNY 200 million in mineral resources last year and plans to open major mines this year.

Business has cooled since the Chinese government last year decided to cut back on railroad projects. Contributing to the decision was a corruption scandal in the national railways ministry and a deadly collision of two China Railways bullet trains that killed 40 people.

CRCC signed only CNY billion worth of new railway contracts in 2011 down 68% from 2010 while CRG said its new contract orders fell 76% to CNY 97 billion. CRCC’s operating revenues declined 2.7% between 2010 and last year while CRG’s net profit for the same period fell 9.6%.

An infrastructure construction analyst said that “Market expectations are for domestic railway construction investment to slow further over the next few years. For railway contractors such as CRG and CRCC to further develop they will have to transform and seek new growth points for their businesses. The construction industry is highly impacted by state investment that can’t guarantee a company’s future development path.”
 

On Much 17, last batch of 24 traction motors were shipped to USA, total 110 railway traction motors contract for USA is fulfilled. It shows that products of CHINA CNR have been joined with the international famous enterprise as the same technology level.
CHINA CNR has specialized enterprise to produce the core components of high-power locos, such as traction motor, inverter and complete traction equipment etc..CHINA CNR’s technical engineers adopt brand new design concept to make a new type traction motor which can be used for two kinds of locos.
As per user’s requirements,CHINA CNR organizes a complete manufacturing process document and different test methods through the process and successfully passed the FAI acceptance inspection.
 
 

According to the Xinhua News Agency, the urban rail transit project of Xiamen, Changzhou and Lanzhou has recently approved by the National Development and Reform Committee (NDRC).
 
A recent high-level forum for China's urban rail transport held in Shanghai shows that a total of 31 mainland Chinese cities have been approved to build their urban rail transit so far. In addition to the four municipalities, most of the cities are located in the more populous and crowded coastal areas.
 
China has seen rapid development of urban rail transit in recent years. In 2011, a total of 283km new rail transit operating mileage was added.
 
Capital cities in Middle and Western China, such as, Wuhan, Chengdu, Xi'an, Changsha, Zhengzhou, Nanning, Kunming, Nanchang, Guiyang and Hefei, and those in Northeastern China are also actively planning their urban rail transit lines.

Xiamen to start construction of 3 urban rail transit lines in 3 years.

Railways are still the most economical form of transportation for moving goods on land, particularly in emerging market nations like China.

The global economic slowdown combined with concerns about fraud in Chinese stocks (FXI, quote) has made a railroad company like Guangshen Railways (GSH, quote) very appealing to emerging market income, growth and value investors.

Fraud may be a concern with many Chinese companies, but it is tough to fake a railroad. A railroad company has valuable assets and is hard to replicate, giving them an economic moat that protects them in tough times.

Railroad company Guangshen also has very attractive valuations. The price-to-book ratio is just 0.58, which means the stock is selling at more than 40% below the value of its assets.

The price-to-sales ratio of 1 tells the same story. This is very low for a railroad; America’s famed Union Pacific Corporation (UNP, quote) has a price-to-sales ratio of 2.65.

China's railway ministry is to investigate equipment produced by a German company after media reports that its products had failed tests.

However, Halfen Group's Chinese branch told Shanghai Daily Wednesday that the company provided quality products for China's high-speed railways and it had not received any complaints about poor quality.

The People's Daily website reported Wednesday that Halfen's cast-in channels, used to support equipment such as wires, signals and electrical devices, fell short of quality standards.

Earlier this month, Century Weekly magazine raised doubts over whether the products were imported from Germany, as the company claimed, or were made in local factories.

Both media organizations cited tip-offs from unnamed insiders.

The website said tests by China's steel material quality testing center and another two institutes showed that the channels failed strength and fire-resistance tests.

People.com.cn said it acquired channels from two sections of the under-contruction Shanghai-Kunming railway line and sent them for testing.

Two pictures on the website showed the channels marked with the Halfen name. "There is no so-called high quality or low quality, there is only one quality standard for Halfen that we have in Europe and in China as well," said Stanislas de Ferrieres, general manager with Halfen (Beijing) Construction Accessories Distribution Co Ltd.

He said the company had documentation to prove the products were from Germany. However, he did not produce it Wednesday.

He said he had visited a section on the Shanghai-Kunming line in central China before the media reports and "no problems were found there."

However, salespeople with the company hinted that some products might have been replaced by local products but still marked as Halfen.

Stanislas de Ferrieres said it was questionable whether the channels mentioned in the media reports were actually made by Halfen.

The company said earlier that Halfen channels "meet all the technical specifications from China's Ministry of Railways."

Liu Zhijun, the former Railways Minister in China and once one of the country's most important men, has been ousted from the Communist Party of China (CPC) after being found guilty of corruption, official paper People's Daily reports.

While the removal of Liu has long been expected (he was removed from his government post in October and has been unavailable for comment since, WSJ reports), its likely to come under increased scrutiny given the controversy over Bo Xilai and his allies.

Allegations of extreme corruption seems be something Bo and Liu have in common at very least. The Central Commission for Discipline Inspection declared Liu "morally corrupted" and state mouthpiece People's Daily said he was responsible for "severe corruption in the railways system".

Liu oversaw China's vast (and frequently used) railway system between 2003-2011, and oversaw a huge infrastructure investment, notably including High Speed Rail (HSR), International Business Times reports.

That dream had fallen apart in 2011 when HSR lines began running slow trains out of safety concerns, and a Japanese firm sued over claims that the HSR trains had copied their bullet train technology. The Beijing Times has a timeline of disasters that lead to Liu's ousting, that includes both a crash in 2008 that killed 70 and another that killed 40 in 2011, with an investigation after the second reporting that the Liu bore responsibility.
 

Engineering firm UGL has won $190 million in contracts to supply and maintain freight locomotives for four different companies.

UGL will deliver a total of 38 locomotives as a result of the contracts with Rio Tinto, Xstrata Coal, QR National and Pacific National Rail, it said on Thursday.

Chief executive Richard Leupen said there remained strong demand for rail stock from the resources sectors on Australia's east and west coasts.

"A large pipeline of locomotive supply and maintenance opportunities is visible and we expect to participate in a significant proportion of these new opportunities as they are awarded," he said in a statement.
 

China’s software sector recorded a 26 percent year-on-year increase in revenue to $103 billion during the first four months of 2012.

The growth is still 1.9 per cent down from the same period a year ago, but it is still  making serious money.

According to Digitimes, which was quoting the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, revenue earned in April rose 25.2 percent year-on-year, and the growth rate was down 5.5 percentage points from the same period a year ago.

Since the second half of 2011, the growth rate of Chinese software exports remained below 20 percent.

During the first four months, software exports increased 10.2 percent year-on-year to $10.48 billion, with the growth rate down 13 percentage points from a year ago.

Chinese domestic industrial software companies are generally divided into three types: the first type of software companies were born out of the manufacturing industry, with a strong professional background, years of service experience, and advanced technical strengths. The second type are general software makers which are pretty ordinary by world standards.   Then there are software companies developed by research institutes of colleges and universities. They are advantaged in basic research and hold more products with independent intellectual property rights.

What might put the fear of god into many in the international software scene is that most parts of the Chinese software sector are by world standards under-developed.   To manage to make that amount of money at this point of the industry’s history is significant.

One of the reasons it does so well is that a few of China’s major industries, including aerospace, aviation, automobile and high-speed rail, rely on industrial software for product design. However, over 90 percent of their products were developed using large-scale imported software. Many large domestic enterprises in China are also using imported management software. This is mainly due to the lack of domestically-produced high-end industrial software and original technologies and transnational corporations. On the whole, China does not hold much edge in the field of high-end industrial software either.

Government is sourcing $990 million from the Investment and Commercial Bank of China for rehabilitation works on the Eastern Rail lines; Nsawam to Accra and Achimota to Tema.

Another $1.95 billion is being sought from the Exim Bank of China for rehabilitation works on the Nsawam to Kumasi rail lines.
In an interview with the Ghana News Agency in Accra on Tuesday, Emmanuel Opoku, Acting Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Ghana Railway Development Authority (GRDA), noted that $500 million dollars would be taken from the $3 billion Chinese loan facility for rehabilitation works on the Western Rail line.
He noted that currently all three rail lines including the Western, Central and Eastern were not in good shape due to bad tracks.
“Rehabilitation works would include mainly the tracks, bridges, signals and telecommunication systems,” he said.
Mr. Opoku said as part of the rehabilitation works, all the gauges (distance between the two sleepers) would be upgraded from 10.67 millimetres to 14.35 millimetres to enable it to link Ghana to other ECOWAS countries.
“The use of the standard gauge would enable us increase the speed of our trains from 57 kilometres per hour to about 180 kilometres per hour,” he added.
Mr. Opoku said government had instituted plans to extend the railway service to the Northern sector and the Volta Region as well.
“Currently, only the southern sector of the country makes use of the rail services due to some socio-economic importance.”
He said the Western Line is linked to the Takoradi Port while the Eastern Line is linked to the Tema Port with the Central Line being linked to both Takoradi and Tema Ports.
Mr. Opoku said GRDA was established in 2009 to regulate activities on the rail sector, while the Ghana Railway Company Limited was to see to the operation of the train services.
“One of our mandates is to work on how we could get the private sector to invest in the nation’s rail sector,” he said.
Mr. Opoku said GRDA had put in place measures to ensure that all coaches that would be imported into the country would be able to take only a specific number of passengers to avoid overloading.
He said the Authority had taken into consideration issues raised by the disability associations on the need for them to import coaches, which were disability–friendly.
Mr. Opoku said rehabilitation works on the rail lines would reduce traffic on the roads and provide safe means of transport for those who use them.
“It is environmentally-friendly and would help reduce pollution of the environment,” he added.

Atlas Iron, Australia's fastest growing iron ore producer, is open to the talks with Andrew Forrest's Fortescue Metals Group to build a new railroad in the Pilbara region that will allow exports to meet demand in Asia.

Atlas was also open to a third partner as long as the Perth-based miner had room to haul its own iron ore, executive chairman David Flanagan said after a conference in Melbourne today.

Fortescue's interest in talks with the smaller rival to cooperate on the development was flagged on May 3.

Iron ore producers including Fortescue and Atlas are boosting output and expanding ports and railway networks to meet growing demand in China, the biggest consumer of the steelmaking raw material.

Fortescue, doubling its main line to Port Hedland as part of an $8.4 billion expansion to almost triple output, may benefit from swapping rail and port capacity with Atlas, Macquarie Group said in an April 27 report.

Macquarie estimates the Atlas railway project may cost $1.5 billion. Atlas, which is seeking to boost annual shipments to 46 million metric tons by 2017 from 6 million tons, tied up with QR National Ltd to study building the line to Port Hedland, the gateway to Asia from the ore-rich region in north-western Australia.

Fortescue declined as much as 5.4 percent to A$4.57 and traded at A$4.68 as of 12:58 p.m. in Sydney, while Atlas fell 0.5 percent to A$2.12. The benchmark index fell 1 percent.