Fig. 1 The tender market for Chemicals in the EU
The tendering market in Europe is undoubtedly big and growing! This comes naturally as a result of the growing need of the public sector for transparency as well as reducing overall cost and expenditure. This affects most of the business sectors in the EU and the Chemicals industry is not an exception.
According to TED*, the annual value of tender awards in the EU exceeds €2.4 bn with more than two thousand tenders published every year. And the market is growing by more than 4% in terms of new tenders released every year (see Fig. 1).
There are many verticals active within the market; however, the market has significant consolidation towards the top three, which capture 80% of the market as can be seen in Fig. 2.
Fig. 2 Verticals presence in the chemical industry tender market
Even more important is the fact that more than half of the new tenders (see Fig. 1) are based on a mix of quality and pricing criteria. This is the result of the continuous effort of the EU, across industries and countries, to move from the lowest bidder “doctrine” to a more sophisticated direction for evaluating tenders combining competitive prices with high standards and quality as well. Even more, most tenders come with a limited time to submit the response after the official publication (37 days – see Fig. 1) which leaves only a narrow window of time to prepare for the tender. Therefore, companies in the chemical industry will have to prepare their tender responses quickly and in a more sophisticated manner and with more criteria to consider. This calls for immediate action to plan ahead for new tenders, improve efficiency in the tender response preparation, and for better qualification and evaluation of new tenders in order to focus on the most important tenders and improve success rates.
This is why, exactly as experienced in other markets, we anticipate a growing interest from chemical companies to organize their tender-driven business in the most efficient and effective way and expect new tender initiatives and enabling technologies to play an important part in this important transformation.
*Based on data (average figures 2016-2018) from TED (Tenders Electronic Daily), ©European Union, http://ted.europa.eu, 1998–2020
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