South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol (left) and Uzbekistant President Shavkat Mirziyoyev hold a joint news conference in Tashkent on June 14
Hyundai Rotem Co., a South Korean rolling stock and defense equipment maker, has secured a 270 billion won ($196 million) order from Uzbekistan to supply high-speed trains, marking the country’s first export of express trains, the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport said on Friday.
The trains with 42 units to be supplied will run on 1,216-kilometer railways in Uzbekistan, including the 590km track between the country’s capital of Tashkent and Bukhara, at a speed of 250km per hour.
They are scheduled to commence perations in April 2027.
Separate from the supply agreement, the two countries inked a memorandum of understanding to cooperate in operating high-speed rail system and providing maintenance and repairment services, as well as building train depots.
The deals came two decades after South Korea launched the Korea Train eXpress (KTX) high-speed train service and are expected to pave the way for its foray in the global high-speed train market forecast to grow to about 10 trillion won, according to SCI Verkehr’s publicaton of the Worldwide market for rail industries 2022.
They were announced in a joint press release following a summit meeting between South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol and Uzbekistant President Shavkat Mirziyoyev in Tashkent.
A concept image of a tain to be supplied to Uzbekistan (Courtesy of the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport)
The trains will have electric multiple units, an upgraded model where each unit self-supplies electricity. That compares with the trains currently operated in Uzbekistan that source electricity only from the front and last units of a train.
In 1994, South Korea signed an express train purchase and relevant technology transfer deal with France’s rolling stock company Alstom.
In 2008, Hyundai Rotem rolled out its first high-speed train made mostly with its own technology. In 2010, it launched the service, catapulting South Korea to the fourth position in the world that commercialized express trains.
Hyundai Rotem sets its sights on Morocco and Poland that are expected to place high-speed train orders in 2025 and 2026, respectively. Hyundai Rotem also targets Saudi Arabia as its new export market.
A handful of companies such as Alstom, Germany’s Siemens and Japan’s Hitachi dominate the world’s high-speed train manufacturing market.
By Byung-Uk Do
dodo@hankyung.com
Yeonhee Kim edited this article
