China Railway Group, the nation's largest railway construction firm, said Wednesday it had won two contracts worth 8.1 billion yuan (1.2 billion dollars).

It said one of its units won a contract worth 7.6 billion yuan for an electrification project of the railway linking Beijing and Kowloon in Hong Kong, according to a statement filed with the Shanghai Stock Exchange.

The project started this month and will be completed in June 2010, it said.

The other contract, worth 513.9 million yuan, is to build a 118-kilometre (73-mile) section of a highway in Ethiopia.

The project would take 42 months to complete, the company said, without saying when it would start.

China Railway, listed in Shanghai and Hong Kong, has constructed more than two-thirds of China's more than 75,000 kilometres of railway lines, according to the company's website.