(Recasts, adds comment from CRRC executive interview)
By Brenda Goh
BEIJING, Sept 17 (Reuters) - A unit of China's CRRC Corp , the world's biggest train maker by revenue, on Thursday agreed a deal to help build a planned high-speed link from Las Vegas to Los Angeles, underlining the rail giant's lofty overseas ambitions.
CRRC, formed from a state-driven merger of China's two largest train makers, is among a large group of the country's rail firms that has inked an accord for the project with XpressWest, a venture set up by Las Vegas-based hotel and casino developer Marnell Companies.
The company is among firms leading China's aggressive pursuit of overseas high-speed rail deals in competition with traditional suppliers such as Germany's Siemens AG and France's Alstom SA. Beijing recently clinched contracts in Russia, although it has faced hurdles in Mexico and Indonesia due to bureaucratic flip-flops in those countries.
The company plans to grow its share of revenue from work overseas to 30 percent within the next five years, a senior executive said in an interview on Wednesday before the XpressWest deal was announced. Having completed its merger in May, it booked first-half revenue of 91.8 billion yuan ($14.42 billion), only 12 percent of which was booked overseas.
"We want to attain the position we deserve in the global market...There is no other company on earth that is able to simultaneously research and produce high-speed trains, electric multiple units, subways," Cao Gangcai, CRRC's vice chief economist, told Reuters in an interview.
Financial terms of CRRC's XpressWest partnership weren't disclosed in a joint statement with the U.S. firm announcing the deal, though it said the project had initial capital of $100 million. XpressWest didn't immediately respond to calls outside Las Vegas business hours seeking comment on the project, for which it won the green light in 2011, according to its website.
XpressWest and the Chinese firms said in their statement that the accord would help accelerate the plan for a 230-mile high-speed line, with an expected construction start date of September 2016.
Gary Wong, an Hong Kong-based analyst at brokerage Guotai Junan, estimated the project could be worth about $5 billion. He said it would likely offer the many Chinese firms involved little financial benefit, but was significant as a means to help open the undeveloped U.S. high-speed rail market.
CRRC also last week broke ground on a factory in the United States which will manufacture trains for Boston's subway system as part of a $556 million deal that China CNR, now part of CRRC, won almost a year ago.
"The United States market is huge because the fact is that their railway tracks and facilities are ageing and need upgrading," vice chief economist Cao said.
($1 = 6.3650 yuan) (Additional Reporting by Megha Rajagopalan and SHANGHAI Newsroom; Editing by Kazunori Takada and Kenneth Maxwell)