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57% of the contract lots I sampled got a single bid - mining EU tenders and award winners from TED

I pulled one week of public contract awards in IT, software and medical supplies from Poland, Germany, France, the Netherlands and Italy: 60 award notices, €141M in total, 179 different winning companies.

Of the 211 lots that reported how many bids they received, 57% got exactly one bid. The average was 2 bids per lot. And 63% of the winners were SMEs.

That’s one week and three categories, so don’t quote it as a European statistic. But it shows what becomes possible when tender data is clean: competition analysis, supplier mapping, and of course finding contracts to bid on.

Where the data comes from

• TED (Tenders Electronic Daily), the EU’s official journal: every tender above EU thresholds, in all EU countries plus Norway, Switzerland and candidate countries. It has a free search API, and each award notice has an eForms XML with the result lot by lot: which company won, at what price, against how many bids.
• BOAMP: French national tenders below EU thresholds.
• DECP: every French contract awarded from €40,000, published by buyers.

All official open data, but in three formats, with values in many currencies, titles in 24 languages and winners buried in XML.

One dataset for all of it

The EU Public Tenders Scraper (an Apify Actor) has two modes.

Open tenders you can still bid on:

{
  "mode": "tenders",
  "cpvCodes": ["72", "48"],
  "countries": ["DE", "AT"],
  "minValueEur": 100000,
  "minDaysToDeadline": 10
}

Each tender comes with the deadline and days left, estimated value in euros, buyer and contact mailbox, category, lots and the link to the documents. A real one from the same week: “Pflege, Weiterentwicklung und Support der Individualsoftware SolumSTAR”, estimated at €31M, deadline for requests to participate on 29 October.

Contract awards with winners:

{ "mode": "awards", "cpvCodes": ["33"], "countries": ["PL"], "publishedWithinDays": 30 }

Each award lists every winning company (name, national ID, city, size, contact, value won) and every lot (title, bids received, winner, value). A real example: a Warsaw military hospital’s medicines tender split into 18 lots and 10 winners; one wholesaler won 4 lots worth €937k.

Search in English, find every language

Keywords are also matched against the official CPV category of each notice in 8 languages. So software finds a German Softwarepflege tender or a Polish oprogramowanie tender even though neither title contains the English word. Notices that only mention your keyword in passing (“submit via our software platform”) are dropped.

The free summary

Every run adds a summary item: value per country and category, top buyers and, for awards, top winners, average bids per lot, share of single-bid lots and share of SME winners. That’s where the numbers at the top of this post come from.

Daily alerts

Add a monitorName, schedule the Actor every morning with publishedWithinDays: 3, and plug in Slack, Telegram, Discord or a webhook: you get only the new notices.

Cost

$0.003 per tender, $0.005 per award (winners lot by lot), $0.003 per run; summaries are free.

Input templates and sample outputs: github.com/EuroScrape/apify-actors.

Part of the EuroScrape actor collection — all articles.