By 2012, just in time for Poland's run as co-host of the European football championships, China Overseas Engineering Group Company (COVEC) is set to complete just over 49 kilometres (30 miles) of the A2 highway linking Warsaw and Berlin.

COVEC's bid for a section of highway between the Polish and German capitals beat out several European competitors.

"This is the first roadworks infrastructure tender won by a Chinese company in Poland," Marcin Hadaj, spokesman for Poland's state GDDKiA roads and highways company, told AFP.

Experts from Europe's construction and public works lobby told AFP the deal is unprecedented in the 27-nation EU.

Polish authorities, meanwhile, have hailed the arrival of the Chinese.

"The presence of Chinese companies has a positive effect on the bid levels in public tenders," said Stanislaw Lesniewski, an official at Poland's infrastructure ministry.

"The Chinese bid was the least expensive and of course that's why it won," he added.

One A2 tender was for a stretch of highway around 29 kilometres (18 miles) long.

COVEC offered to build it for 754.5 million zloty (185 million euros, 267 million dollars) -- or just 44 percent of the sum the Polish state had estimated it would cost.

Jerzy Frenkiel, CEO of Decoma, a Polish company which has partnered up with COVEC, flatly rejected accusations that the Chinese used dumping rates to undercut their rivals.

"The other competitors also made bids substantially lower than the estimate," Frenkiel said, explaining that estimated costs were drafted when prices were at a peak.

Experience gained ahead of the Beijing Olympics in 2008 and ample liquidity gave COVEC a major advantage over competitors, according to Hadaj.

"They don't need expensive credit to finance the project, so this is why their bid was unbeatable," he said.

Rivals such as European giants Strabag of Austria, Sweden's Skanska and Spain's Ferrovial, which have shared the Polish market up to now, "are too eager," Frenkiel said. "The Chinese are happy with an honest profit."

"To arrive at this price, a number of workers, especially managers who are less expensive than their Western counterparts, will come from China," he said.

Twenty-five Chinese engineers are already doing groundwork before the project kicks off in the spring.

Ex-communist Poland, a relatively large central European country of 38 million people, has a transport network light years behind that of its Western neighbours.

It is a legacy of underinvestment during five decades of communism and of a failure to get enough road projects underway since the fall of the regime in 1989.

Many of Poland's major cities, let alone small towns, are connected by single-lane roads, and drivers need stamina and time to make journeys that in Western Europe would often be several hours shorter.

Poland slowly has been building a basic multi-lane highway network -- to date, 837 kilometres (519 miles) out of the total 1,800 kilometres (1,116 miles) planned by 2012.

Getting even a small slice of the action in Poland's highway construction translates into big business.

Warsaw's highway development plan for 2008-2012 is worth 27.5 billion euros (40.5 billion dollars), of which close to a third is covered by EU funding for the bloc's less well-off member states.

Separately, the European Investment Bank (EIB) has since 1990 lent Poland 7.2 billion euros for road projects.

"Whether a company is Chinese or European, we are not going to decide for our client how it will use the money, so long as the Chinese company respects our rules. And they respect all the rules as far as I know," EIB spokesman Dusan Ondrejicka told AFP.

COVEC company representatives refused to comment on the contract. Three years ago the company opened an office in Warsaw, its only foothold in Europe.

"In reality, within the group of ten states which joined the European Union five years ago, Poland is, in our opinion, the most promising market," COVEC vice president Zhao Xiang said in a rare interview with a Polish website earlier this year.

"We are also interested in infrastructure projects in Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary. We're also following developments in Ukraine. Russia remains too unpredictable for us for the moment," he said.

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