On December 19th, China-Thailand railway project was officially launched. The railway, to be constructed entirely with China’s technology, standards and equipment, will be 845 kilometers long, with its first-stage project planned to be kicked off at the beginning of 2016 and to be finished in 2019 and the second-stage to be started at the beginning of 2017 and completed in 2020.

The construction of the railway will enhance not only trade and personnel exchanges between the two countries, but also the interconnection between Southeast Asian countries. It is learned that YichangBlack Whirlwind Saw Company, which has set up factories in Thailand, will also profit from the project.

To speed up the implementation of “Go Global” strategy and to integrate it with the “Belt and Road” strategy, Black Whirlwind Saw Company ranks its subsidiary in Thailand as a major cooperative project. In 2014, the company launched a project in Thailand with an annual output of 1.6 million pieces of high performance diamond saw-blade matrix. Now the first stage of the project has been put into production with its personnel over 20.

“By the year of 2015, the total industrial output value of the project in Thailand hits nearly 10 million yuan.” TianShuangyan from the company told the reporter. However, because of the limited processing capacity of the downstream manufacturers, the production scale of the project has not reached its designed goal, yet with the improvement of the processing capacity of the downstream manufacturers, the total industrial output value of the project will increase steadily in a few years.

Because alloy-steel plates, the raw materials for the production, need to be imported from China, their transportation has become one of the bottlenecks restricting the rapid development of the project. “Currently the raw materials are dispatched from Shanghai Customs to Thailand by sea. The shipment takes about one month and a half. The long duration makes it too costly.” If the planned China-Thailand railway passes the Bangkok airport, near which the diamond saw-blade matrix project is located, then the materials can be transported by train, which will increase the delivery efficiency significantly and hopefully reduce the shipping costs. (Reporter Cao Yang)