CREC's global projects move ahead despite epidemic

China Railway Group Ltd, the Beijing-based centrally administrated State-owned construction contractor, has been teaming up with local business partners across the world to sustain its big-ticket projects even though a number of infrastructure project operations have been slowed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

"Despite the threat of the pandemic, most of our employees working overseas have chosen to stay where they are, standing together with the local people and helping each other," said Ren Hongpeng, vice-president of China Railway Group, which is also known as CREC.

All of its overseas units and offices have strictly complied with the COVID-19 prevention and control measures in host countries. These measures have laid down protocols for each project in accordance with local conditions, Ren added.

Speaking of the Jakarta-Bandung high-speed railway project, Ren said all of CREC's work units are classified and managed according to different levels of risk in Indonesia. Medical offices have been set up along the line, and medical personnel are providing services to all employees.

The SOE plans to complete $537 million worth of construction works for the Jakarta-Bandung high-speed railway project in 2020. It has completed more than 20 percent of the total project work during the first four months of this year.

The 143-kilometer long railroad is under construction by PT Kereta Cepat Indonesia-China, a consortium involving Indonesia's State-owned companies and China's central SOEs, including China Railway Signal and Communication Co, China Railway Rolling Stock Corp and Power Construction Corporation of China.

Apart from the 200-plus medical workers sent to Indonesia, Laos, Bangladesh, Bolivia, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Kenya to help them contain the virus, the company has provided host countries and local partners with medical supplies such as masks and disinfectants.

The firm has donated COVID-19 supplies worth almost $1 million to these countries.

At the site of its China-Laos railway project, Ren said the group has set up four work groups for COVID-19 prevention and control, and brought in professional health workers and psychologists to strengthen their prevention and treatment capabilities.

"Through centralized management of medical materials, efficient supply is ensured," he said.

In addition to the efforts made overseas, there are over 14,000 CREC's workers taking up their mission without any hesitation to assist the domestic fight against the virus.

They not only conducted urgent construction work on the Huoshenshan and Leishenshan hospitals, which were completed within two weeks in early February, and provided more than 2,000 beds for patients in Wuhan, Hubei province, but also worked around the clock and managed to build 45 emergency hospitals across 11 provinces and cities within 30 days, providing over 33,000 beds to the patients in those areas.

The outbreak has deepened central SOEs' capacity for cross-industry collaboration in building large-scale facilities and producing specific goods within a short period for emergency purposes. It has also expanded the scope of application of new technologies like 5G telecoms, cloud-based gaming, augmented reality, virtual reality, service robots, and drones by the SOEs, said Li Jin, chief researcher at the China Enterprise Research Institute in Beijing.