The story
The company was founded in 1992. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of China Communications Construction Company. ZPMC is listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange. It specializes in designing, manufacturing, erecting, commissioning, shipping in fully erected state, after-sales servicing and developing new port machinery products. Its main products include container cranes (QCs) (supplied eight for London Gateway), rubber-tyred gantry cranes (RTGs), bulk-material ship loaders and unloaders, bucket-wheel stackers and reclaimers, portal cranes, floating cranes engineering vessels and large steel bridge structures. Its cranes are found in 120 large ports around the globe.
In 2009, the company rebranded itself as Shanghai Zhenhua Heavy Industries Co., Ltd.
In 2021, the Port of Piraeus received three ZPMC container cranes, doubling the lifting capabilities of the former container crane and equipped with a remote control system.
In 2021, agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) believed to have discovered intelligence-gathering equipment on a cargo ship delivering ZPMC cranes to the Port of Baltimore. China saw the report as paranoid. Since the 2023 Chinese balloon incident, the ZPMC has come under suspicion by U.S. officials and lawmakers over their cranes suspected spying capabilities and ZPMC's participation in military-civil fusion.
In February 2024, US officials announced a plan to have the United States Coast Guard oversee the cybersecurity of port cranes and invest in replacements of ZPMC cranes at US ports. In March 2024, The Wall Street Journal reported that US congressional investigators identified a communications device in ZPMC cranes not part of normal operations. A probe by the United States House Committee on Homeland Security and the United States House Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party found that ZPMC pressured port operators to allow it remote access.
From Wikipedia’s article on ZPMC, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4