Knowledge for bidders
Insights
Facts, examples and practice from public procurement — what leads to exclusion, which appeals succeed, and what the data shows.
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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