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- THE WEEK, Page 22BUSINESSIf at First You Don't Succeed, Buy Again
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- After a rebuff, Sumitomo and Los Angeles strike a rail-car deal
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- Maybe it wasn't such a bad deal after all. Last December,
- Los Angeles awarded Japan's Sumitomo Corp. a contract to build
- 41 cars for its light-rail system. A month later, the company
- was derailed from the $121 million contract when, in a fit of
- buy-American sentiment stirred in part by George Bush's visit
- to Japan, the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission
- canceled the deal and said it would rewrite the specifications
- to attract a U.S. company. Last week the commission revealed the
- firm selected to build 15 of the new cars: Sumitomo Corp.
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- After considerable searching, the panel admitted, it had
- found no American contractor that would agree to accept the
- revised specs. To save face for Angelenos, the new contract
- includes a Sumitomo commitment to ship cars from its Nagoya
- factory to Los Angeles in partly completed condition -- thus
- creating 79 assembly jobs in Los Angeles -- and to spend 60% of
- the contract's value in the U.S.
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