BEIJING (Reuters) - China's State Grid [STGRD.UL], the world's single-largest copper buyer, plans to resume some tenders and building of infrastructure projects, including a power network for the 2020 winter Olympics, it said on Friday.
Most businesses in China are expected to return to work next Monday after an extended holiday for the Lunar New Year ordered by Beijing as it sought to rein in an epidemic that has killed almost 640 and infected nearly 29,000.
"(We) will make all efforts to restart work...and help prompt production resumption of the upstream and downstream companies," State Grid, which pushed back dozens of post-holiday purchase tenders because of the outbreak, said in a statement.
The company aims to complete 28 purchase tenders for February, worth around 19.642 billion yuan, and issue another 23 tenders to be completed in March.
It will resume construction of five ultra-high voltage (UHV) electricity transmission lines, worth a total of 71.3 billion yuan ($10 billion).
It will also start to build a fifth, from the northwestern province of Shaanxi to the central province of Hubei, and a pumped-hydro energy storage project in the coal mining hub of Shanxi, valued at a combined 26.5 billion yuan, it added.