Six months of tender recon, in numbers

Six months of running recon on every open IT and digital tender in Belgium leaves you with a spreadsheet nobody asked for. In that window we tracked 2,809 published tenders across 921 contracting authorities, 1,479 of which have since been awarded. Four things in it were not obvious going in.

Where the repeat winners are

Of the 2,263 distinct firms that won something in those six months, 278 won more than once. The market is not closed to newcomers; nearly a thousand separate buyers were spending. Incumbency simply compounds. Win one multi-year framework and you become the reference case the next three tenders in that sector quietly measure against.

This is discouraging if you read it as "the market is rigged." It is more useful read as "the market rewards momentum," which is a problem you can actually plan around: pick the lots where nobody has momentum yet.

The buyers nobody talks about

The authorities that show up in industry conversation are rarely the ones moving the most volume. Across everything we track, the ten most active authorities average 5.5 bidders per lot. Every other authority averages 2.5. Same sector, comparable scopes, less than half the competition.

And 37.6% of lots with a published bidder count drew exactly one bid. Nearly four in ten public contracts here went to the only firm that showed up.

The tender everyone is watching is, definitionally, the one with the least room for you in it.

1. Median bidders per lot is 2. Almost four in five lots (78.6%) drew three bidders or fewer.
2. The ten busiest authorities pull more than double the bidders per lot of everyone else.
3. The median winning bid in the window was just under €79,000. This market is far more mid-sized work than headline framework contracts.

None of this is destiny. It is a description of where the crowd already is, which is exactly the information that is most useful before you decide where to spend a proposal-writing week.