China Railway Group Limited known as CREC is a Chinese construction company which floats in Shanghai and Hong Kong stock exchanges. The major shareholder of the company is the state-owned China Railway Engineering Corporation. By revenue, CREC is the largest construction company in the world in the 2015 Engineering News-Record "Top 225 Global Contractors". In 2016, CRECG ranks in the 57th place among FortuneGlobal 500 Enterprises and the 7th place among Top 500 Chinese Enterprises.
In November 2007, CREC announced that it would be listing A shares and H shares on the Shanghai and Hong Kong respectively. The IPO price of A share ranged from 4 to 4.8 Chinese yuan while that of H share ranged from 5.03 to 5.78 Hong Kong dollar. CREC joined the Hang Seng China Enterprises Index from 10 March 2008. In support of a cross country railway building boom in Venezuela, CREC began construction in 2009 of the Anaco-Tinaco railroad, an 800 million USD project to building a 471 km high speed railway line through the agriculture belt. This company appeared to break new ground in the European Union in 2009 when the COVEC subsidiary along with two Chinese partners were awarded the tender to construct two parts of the A2 highway in Poland. The project began well in the design and preparation stages with COVEC demonstrating "technical acumen" but work ran aground at later stages because of mismanagement within a tight regulatory framework, ending in failure for COVEC and replacement by other contractors. In 2016, the group subsidiary China Railway Engineering Equipment Group supplied the first commercial rectangular tunnel boring machine, used for an underpass of Singapore's Thomson–East Coast MRT line.
The works of a CREC subsidiary active in the Democratic Republic of the Congo are the focal point of the 2011 documentary Empire of Dust. The film is directed by Belgian filmmaker Bram Van Paesschen. In the documentary, the employees of the company just set up camp near the mining city ofKolwezi. The goal of CREC is to redo the road - covering 300 kilometers - that connects Kolwezi with Lubumbashi. The Chinese man Lao Yang is head of logistics of the group. Since a massive resources-for-infrastructure deal in 2007, China endeavors to take on a wide range of development projects to be paid for by Congo’s immense copper and cobalt reserves. Though a promising deal for the Congolese– the majority of whom live on less than $1.25 a day– the deal’s lack of transparency has made it the subject of scrutiny for human rights organizations. Empire of Dust examines the human aspect of this exchange. The documentary is lauded for its depiction of the cultural differences between the Chinese and Congolese employees.
