THE winner of a Reais 3.6bn (€672m) contract to supply 44 new trains for São Paulo Metro is due to be announced on September 30. According to the São Paulo Metropolitan Transport Secretariat (STM) of the São Paulo state government, the winning bid to supply the fleet of six-car metro trains will be announced in public.
An international tender was launched by the state government in December 2023. Half of the new fleet will operate on the extension of Line 2/Green that is expected to open in 2026-27, with the remainder allocated to Line 1/Blue and Line 3/Red.
The winning bid should have been announced on March 21, but the tender process was suspended by STM three days earlier after several potential bidders complained about the tender terms. One of them made the participation of foreign manufacturers practically impossible, as there was an impossibly short deadline for foreign bidders to register with the National Bank for Economic and Social Development (BNDES) which is funding the new fleet.
The tender process was therefore extended. The new fleet will introduce technology that is completely new to São Paulo Metro, such as driverless operation at Grade of Automation 4 (GoA4) and real-time condition monitoring.
Local sources suggest that the winning bid will be hotly contested as there are currently no other major train orders in the pipeline in Brazil. Only Alstom has a significant workload at its facility in Taubate, where it is producing metro trains for Lines 6/Orange, 8/Diamond and 9/Emerald, as well rolling stock for export. Manufacturers such as CAF and Hyundai Rotem have not supplied trains to Brazil for several years.
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