Portugal: The European Commission has wrapped up its investigation into CRRC. It concluded that the Chinese manufacturer received state subsidies that enabled it to submit the lowest bid in the design, build and maintain tender for the Violet Line in Portugal’s capital.
Launched in April 2025 by Metropolitano de Lisboa, the tender drew bids from four consortia, ranging from €599 mln to €716 mln. The lowest came from a consortium pairing CRRC with Portugal’s Mota-Engil, in which the Chinese manufacturer was responsible only for supplying 12 trams.
The investigation opened in November. By mid-April the procurement had resumed, with Pesa taking CRRC’s place in the consortium. The Commission found that the Polish manufacturer had not received subsidies that distort market conditions — although Pesa itself is controlled by Poland’s state-owned Polish development fund PFR and, with PFR’s backing, recently secured €1.6 bln in financing earmarked in part for export expansion.
A response from the China Chamber of Commerce to the EU CCCEU followed quickly. It noted that CRRC was acting purely as a subcontractor, with a share of less than 10% of the overall contract, and argued that the Commission had not produced sufficient grounds to exclude the company. Current enforcement of the Foreign Subsidies Regulation, the chamber warned, raises the risk of selective application.
Mounting resistance to Chinese expansion in the EU
The Commission’s investigation falls under the EU’s tightened rules on procurement and asset acquisitions, formally adopted in 2023. Those rules were largely a response to CRRC’s push into Europe, which by then included winning a tram supply tender for Porto, Portugal, acquiring Germany’s locomotive builder Vossloh Locomotives, etc.
The Portuguese case is the second time these additional checks have been applied to a CRRC bid. The first, in 2024, involved a Bulgarian tender for passenger trainsets; CRRC withdrew before the investigation concluded, and the contract went to Spain’s Talgo.
Late 2025 brought further moves to tighten access to the EU market. One trigger was the entry into commercial service of CRRC’s double-deck EMUs with a private operator, which set off another round of initiatives against Chinese expansion. “Technological sovereignty” has since become part of the European policy lexicon.
In February this year, at the EU competitiveness summit, Austria’s federation of the railway industry VBI called for projects financed from public funds to carry a mandatory minimum 50% EU value-added requirement. VBI also urged a shift away from lowest-price procurement towards comprehensive assessment based on life-cycle costs.
The European Commission followed in early March with its draft Industrial Accelerator Act, designed to give priority in public procurement and state support to products with high EU value added (‘Made in EU’) and a low carbon footprint. The draft also brings the concept of strategic economic sectors into the regulatory framework. UNIFE, the European Rail Supply Industry Association, responded by calling for rail manufacturing—left out of the initial draft—to be designated strategic. Last autumn UNIFE had likewise put forward additional measures to limit foreign manufacturers’ access to EU public procurement.
Meanwhile, faced with economic headwinds at home, the EU’s largest rolling stock manufacturers continue to expand their production capacity in the USA.
