Winning Technologies to be used in High Speed Rail extensions

The companies that have technology and do not participate in the tender process for the bullet train to connect São Paulo, Campinas and Rio de Janeiro, will be excluded from future tenders for the extensions to other cities, including Curitiba and Belo Horizonte, planned as part of the Growth Acceleration Program (Programa de Aceleração do Crescimento – PAC).

The technology that is awarded this project is the technology that will be used in Brazil for all other projects, the General Director of the National Land Transport Agency (Agência Nacional de Transportes Terrestres – ANTT), Bernardo Figueiredo. And, what’s more, the Brazilian technology will probably be the most competitive in Argentina, Chile and also in other areas, he stressed. The logic is the same as that of the system used in the Nippo-Brazilian model of digital TV, which is now being exported to several countries.

In the opinion of the General Director, it is with this global view that the Korean consortium has upheld its proposal to participate in the auction. The consortium well knows that, if they win this auction, then their technology will gain a scale which they can never gain back in Korea. It could take time, but Brazil will have a high-speed train system which is much faster than that of Europe.

Strategy

After the choice of the winning technology, Brazil will then proceed with the internalization of the model, to make it possible to produce such equipment in Brazil. Then will I be holding another tender and opening the process again (for the choice of technology)? Then I will never have a national scale of production, Mr. Figueiredo stressed.

For this reason, he warns that the technology companies should regard the participation in the High Speed Rail (HSR) auction process, scheduled for April, in a strategic way. This technology personnel does not see this from the strategic standpoint. They think that the Government will go around hiring a different type of technology at each moment. However, the Government neither can nor will do this.

Consortiums

The impasse between contractors and those companies holding the technology, for the formation of the consortiums that will participate in the auction process, seems to be coming to an end. The contractors are putting themselves objectively in the role of investors, says Mr. Figueiredo.

Only a few weeks ago, this was the greatest difficulty to establish the structure of the groups, as he stated to the Estado Agency. In the opinion of Mr. Figueiredo, there will be at least three consortiums: the Korean group, the group led by the São Paulo State Association of Entrepreneurs in Public Works (Apeop), which brings together large companies, and a third consortium headed by giants of this industry, including Odebrecht and Andrade Gutierrez.