towns with an industrial heritage, the transformation of a factory that had stood derelict for decades into a shiny modern manufacturing site might seem a welcome development. But in Springfield, Massachusetts, famous for the rifles produced at its National Armoury, the arrival of a Chinese trainmaker has hit the buffers.
It is not that Springfield has no history of trainmaking; two centuries ago it built some of the first American-made railway carriages to replace British imports. The need for a local manufacturing base is what led, the world’s biggest producer of locomotives and rolling stock, to set up shop there in 2017. Since then it has been attacked by the press as a threat to American jobs and national security.
controls over 90% of the Chinese railway market—which also happens to be the world’s biggest. With its domestic business cornered, the company set its sights on expansion abroad. Liu Hualong,’s chairman, went about this by setting up overseas subsidiaries to handle some of the support and assembly operations. First he took aim at Asia and Africa, then Europe and America.now employs 180,000 people worldwide and posts annual revenues of $30.6bn, around a tenth of which comes from outside China.
America is an especially attractive market, owing to its preference for customised trains, which fetch a premium over the off-the-yard variety favoured elsewhere in the world. Thanks to a renewed interest in rail travel, particularly among America’s carless young, it is also fast-growing, says Jia Bo, president of’s Springfield subsidiary. Since 2014 the company has won four big contracts in America for subway carriages. It delivered its first American-built train in December.