Small firms assume public tenders are stitched up by large incumbents. We tested that against 1,246,260 contract awards published in the EU's official tender journal. In 69% of markets the median contract drew two bids or fewer, and small and medium firms won 73% of everything awarded. Competition was never the hard part. Knowing which market is open, before you spend three weeks writing a bid, is.
These are identical procurement categories under identical EU directives. The share of contracts won by small and medium firms is not remotely identical. A category that looks hopeless from Lyon is close to uncontested from Prague.
Pick a country and a category. You get the real win rate for small firms, how many rivals actually turn up, what the contracts are worth, and whether five suppliers already hold the market. Select any row for the suppliers who keep winning it.
| Market | SME win rate | Micro | Median bids | Concentration | Contract value | Awards |
|---|
You send your company size, the countries you can actually serve, your categories and the largest contract you can deliver. You get every matching market scored and ranked, the incumbents you would be bidding against, and the buyers that keep awarding to firms your size — by name.
#1 Germany — Architectural, engineering and inspection
SCORE 88.6/100 → PRIORITY
SMEs win the majority of awards, the supplier base is
fragmented and bidder counts are low.
SME win rate ......... 88.7% (large firms take 11.3%)
Your size band ....... 41.8% of awards go to small firms
Typical competition .. 2.0 bids per contract (n=332)
Concentration ........ 14.3% held by top 5 · 330 winners
Contract value ....... EUR 40k – EUR 432k (median 177k)
Who you would bid against:
· Hanack und Partner 17 wins
· Emch+Berger GmbH, Halle/S. 16 wins
· DB Engineering & Consulting GmbH 14 wins
Buyers that award to firms your size:
· Berliner Wasserbetriebe 100% to SMEs (10)
· Deutsche Bahn AG Konzernleitung 96.6% to SMEs (29)
· DB InfraGO AG – Fahrweg 67.9% to SMEs (28)
#7 Germany — Transport equipment
SCORE 31.4/100 → AVOID
Locked market: the top five suppliers take 74% of all
awards. Displacing an incumbent is a multi-year effort.
It ranks, it does not list. Alert services tell you a tender exists. Every competitor got the same alert. This tells you which of those tenders are worth your three weeks.
It names the incumbent. Bidding blind against a supplier sitting on a decade of framework contracts is how small firms burn a year of bid budget. You will know before you start.
It prices the realistic band. The quartile range of what was actually awarded in that market — not the buyer's published estimate, which is routinely wrong in both directions.
It tells you where not to bid. 52 of the markets we scored are held by five suppliers. Knowing to walk away from one of them pays for the report on its own.
A serious tender response costs a small firm two to four weeks of senior time. This is priced so that avoiding a single hopeless bid pays for it several times over.
Contract award notices published in Tenders Electronic Daily, the European Union's official procurement journal, retrieved through its public API. EU open data, free to reuse commercially under Decision 2011/833/EU. No scraping of protected sites.
One award, to one supplier, for one lot. A notice covering several lots contributes
several awards. Markets are grouped by buyer country and CPV division.
A single dynamic purchasing system can award hundreds of lots at once — one Latvian notice carried 277. Left unchecked, one procurement event becomes a "market". Each notice contributes at most 20 awards and exactly one competition observation, and markets averaging more than eight awards per notice are excluded entirely.
Taken from the winner-size field contracting authorities file with each
award. SME covers micro, small and medium. Only markets carrying at least 30 sized
awards are published, and every figure shows the sample it rests on.
Roughly half of markets carry a usable micro / small / medium breakdown. Some countries — Czechia and Slovenia among them — file only a generic SME flag, so those columns read not reported rather than 0%. A blank there means the authority did not say, never that small firms fail to win.
The share of awards in a market held by its five most frequent winners. Above 60% we mark the market locked: entry is possible, but rarely worth a small firm's bid budget.
The median of the tender counts contracting authorities report per contract. Where a buyer does not report one, that contract is excluded rather than assumed.
Many EU suppliers are sole traders trading under their own civil name. Those names are personal data, so we suppress them: they appear as sole trader (name withheld) while the win counts stay. Registered companies and public buyers are named. To object to any processing, write to the address in the footer.
Statistical analysis of published records. Not legal advice, not procurement advice, not a prediction of any individual outcome, and not an assessment of eligibility under any tender's qualification rules.