PARIS (Reuters) - A consortium led by French construction company Eiffage has won a 795 million euro (674.45 million pounds) contract for work on the southern branch of the Paris metro's new line 15, part of the French capital's largest infrastructure project in decades.
The contract was announced on Friday by Societe du Grand Paris, the state-owned company in charge of the whole development project worth an estimated 25-30 billion euros and due for completion by 2030.
It is the third of three major contracts for the project. In February 2016, a consortium led by construction group Vinci (PA:SGEF) and a consortium lead by Bouygues (PA:BOUY) won contracts worth 926 million and 968 million euros respectively.
Two more smaller contracts are still due to be awarded by the end of the first half.
The project is backed by the French state and the local authority for the Ile-de-France region, which numbers 12 million habitants and accounts for almost a third of France's gross domestic product (GDP).
At its heart lies one of the biggest infrastructure network projects in Europe, the Grand Paris Express, which consists of building a metro route ring around Paris (Line 15) and other lines for emerging neighborhoods (Lines 16, 17 and 18).
The project entails building some 200 km of automatic metro lines and 68 new metro stations with links to the capital's three airports and high-speed TGV rail stations.
The construction of 70,000 new homes every year also forms part of the project, which aims to create a million jobs.