Knowledge for bidders
Insights
Facts, examples and practice from public procurement — what leads to exclusion, which appeals succeed, and what the data shows.
Reasons for exclusion The requirement that isn't in the tender file
The buyer writes "in accordance with the rail infrastructure technical specification" and that one sentence attaches a whole section of requirements never included in the tender. Legally it exists. Practically nobody read it. On incorporation by reference — the quietest ground for exclusion.
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Market data 660,000 scanned decisions nobody reads
A large share of decisions and protocols are published as scanned images with no text layer. Formally public. Practically invisible to any search. What surfaces once they are read.
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Appeals The reasoning that never reaches the register
Public indexes show who won the appeal. The reasoning — why — is usually missing. And it is the reasoning that decides how the next similar dispute goes. On 6,305 rulings by the CPC and the Supreme Court, and why the operative part is not enough.
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Market data How we know who won
182,000 winner records, each tagged with where it came from: the official dump, the public API, reading the page, or a language model over the decision. Why the source matters and why the records do not all weigh the same.
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Market data Construction in public procurement: €18 billion and the game of survival
What the largest sector by value in Bulgarian public procurement looks like — and why more bidders are eliminated here than anywhere else.
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Market data Fuels and energy: the market of direct contracts
Where 39% of tenders are awarded without a notice, competition boils down to a single bidder, and a standardised commodity turns everything into a pure price game.
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Market data Medical procurement: 36 thousand contracts and the tyranny of the lowest price
The busiest market in the country — where thousands of small deliveries are decided by cents, and one missed declaration costs the whole tender.
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Market data Transport services: the market with one bidder per tender
Publicly funded transport — the highest average contract value, yet the lowest competition: the winner is whoever has the fleet and the paperwork in order. An analysis of 2,748 contracts worth €1.72 billion.
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Market data Vehicles and special equipment worth €4 billion: a market for the prepared
Transport equipment in public procurement — expensive contracts, few bidders, and why the winner here is the one who is ready before the tender is even announced.
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Reasons for exclusion How to prevent the top 50 reasons for disqualification — predictably and at scale
The most frequent grounds for exclusion, distilled from 5,679 real cases across 59 firms, are predictable — which makes them preventable. Over four fifths are documents or technical non-compliance, not price. Here's how we neutralise them systematically, before submission.
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Disqualifications Case study: the builder who lost €40M in winnable tenders to paperwork
Anatomy of one real construction firm: 2,668 bids, 389 contracts won worth €84M — and nearly 1,400 exclusions. On €40M of them it had the lowest price and still dropped out, purely over a document. The full anonymized report is attached.
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Disqualifications Why you get disqualified: the most common mistakes that sink bids
We read over 18,000 evaluation reports (4,222 exclusions) from 59 active bidders. About 1 in 4 bids is excluded on a technicality — and over 80% of exclusions are about documents or technical non-compliance, not price.
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Reasons for exclusion Not price, but paperwork: why companies really lose public tenders
An analysis of nearly 19,700 bids and thousands of reports from 59 active firms: the reasons for losing cluster by sector — documents for builders, price for traders. And why public winner records often lie.
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Reasons for exclusion Formal vs substantive reasons for exclusion
Most lost tenders aren't lost to a better competitive offer — they're lost to a technicality. Here's the difference between the two types of exclusion grounds, and why it decides your strategy.
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Market data One in two public tenders in Bulgaria has no competition
An analysis of nearly 59,000 tenders and 131,000 lots (2023–2026): 45% of procedures have a single bidder. Which sectors and regions are most closed — and what it means for companies.
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