HONG KONG—Hyundai Engineering & Construction Co., South Korea’s largest builder by market value, received a $2.07-billion contract to build a power plant in Qatar, the single-biggest overseas plant order for a South Korean company.

Hyundai Engineering won the subcontract from Mitsui & Co. after the Japanese company was awarded an order to build a power plant and a desalination facility from the Qatar Electricity & Water Corp., the Seoul-based company said in a regulatory filing Friday. The contract will be signed this month.

The transaction will help South Korean builders win record orders for a third year as economic growth and surging oil prices prompt increased spending on refineries and infrastructure in the Middle East.

Mitsui and France’s Suez SA have 40 percent of the $3.7-billion project to build Qatar’s biggest power and water facility, with the rest split between state-owned Qatar Petroleum and Qatar Electricity.

The plant in the Ras Laffan Industrial City, about 80 kilometers north of Doha, will have a capacity of 2,728 megawatts once construction is completed in 2011, said Hyundai Engineering.

In the first quarter, Hyundai Engineering received 3.93 trillion won, or $3.9 billion, in orders, of which almost half came from overseas. It aims to secure 12.4 trillion won in contracts this year.

The company has won $1.95 billion in orders as of Friday, an increase from $99.1 million a year earlier, according to the International Contractors Association of Korea. (Bloomberg)

‘Government should do its part to upgrade roads to ports’

ASIAN Terminals Inc. (ATI) said its effort to modernize its flagship facility in Manila would be rendered useless if the government would not reciprocate by putting up more infrastructure going in and out of the port.

THE transportation arm of the Aboitiz Group suffered a net loss for the first quarter of the year as the company said it is continuing to change its operations from purely ferrying passengers and delivering cargoes into becoming a value-added service provider to other firms.

HONG KONG—Hyundai Engineering & Construction Co., South Korea’s largest builder by market value, received a $2.07-billion contract to build a power plant in Qatar, the single-biggest overseas plant order for a South Korean company.

WASHINGTON—A one-day strike by 6,000 port workers on the US West Coast brought cargo operations to “a virtual standstill” last week, the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA) said.