Dongfang Electric Corp, which lost 500 workers and factories accounting for 20 percent of revenue in China's May 12 earthquake, said it received as much as 7 billion yuan (US$1 billion) of orders for power plants and generators.

New contracts include a coal-fired plant for Huaneng Power International Inc and generators for Huadian Power International Co, Chief Financial Officer Gong Dan said in a Bloomberg News interview at Dongfang's office in Sichuan Province's Chengdu City, about 80 kilometers from the epicenter. The orders include projects outside of the quake zone, he said.

Dongfang Electric, China's second-largest maker of power plant turbines and boilers, will need one to two years to return to normal production after the 8.0-magnitude quake killed about half of the workers at a factory belonging to its Dongfang Steam Turbine Co unit in Hanwang, Sichuan Province. The company will relocate the plant to a site near the company's Deyang headquarters in the same province.

"We have the resources and contracts to overcome the problem," Gong said on Tuesday. "Our priorities now are to resume output to complete the 40 billion yuan of contracts in hand, resettle our workers and relocate our production."

Orders worth 4.5 billion yuan were placed with Dongfang for six 660-megawatt coal-fired and wind-powered generators, Huaneng Power said on May 24.

The contract for projects in Shaanxi Province, away from the Sichuan quake epicenter, was the first order since the earthquake and would "give some support to Dongfang's reconstruction after the quake," Huaneng spokesman Li Zhaokui said yesterday.

Last year, Dongfang reported net income of 2.2 billion yuan on sales of 24.1 billion yuan. The company is still assessing the financial loss, which the Guangzhou Daily newspaper on May 26 estimated at 5 billion yuan.

The government has urged banks to ease lending terms and accelerate loan approvals to help rebuild the quake-hit areas. Firms in Sichuan face economic losses of 67 billion yuan, said the Ministry of Industry and Information.

Dongfang Electric, which is also a pump maker for nuclear power plants with Areva SA, received nearly 60 billion yuan of credit.

(Shanghai Daily June 5, 2008)