How competitive is Belgian procurement? Bids per tender by sector
IT services draw nearly four times as many bidders as financial contracts
The single sharpest finding from Belgian contract-award notices published on TED (Tenders Electronic Daily, the EU's official public-procurement journal) is the gulf between the most and least contested sectors. IT services — covering consulting, software, and support (CPV division 72, where CPV stands for Common Procurement Vocabulary, the EU's standardised goods-and-services classification) — averaged 8.48 bids per award. Financial and insurance services (CPV 66) averaged just 2.03 bids per award. That is a ratio of more than four to one between the top and bottom of the table.
Where competition is strongest
The five most competitive CPV divisions, ranked by average bid count, were:
| Sector | Avg. bids | Awards reported | Coverage |
|---|---|---|---|
| IT services (72) | 8.48 | 1,195 | 99.2% |
| Business services — law, marketing, consulting (79) | 7.83 | 1,344 | 99.3% |
| Architectural, engineering & inspection services (71) | 7.18 | 828 | 93.7% |
| Food, beverages & tobacco (15) | 6.93 | 430 | 99.5% |
| Research & development services (73) | 5.53 | 421 | 99.0% |
IT services and business services are also the two largest sectors by award volume in this dataset, with 1,195 and 1,344 awards respectively, and both have coverage rates above 99%, meaning the averages are highly representative.
Architectural and engineering services (CPV 71) show a slightly lower coverage rate of 93.7% — 776 of 828 awards reported a bid count — so the 7.18 average should be read with marginally more caution, though the direction is clear.
Construction work (CPV 45), a sector closely watched for competition concerns across Europe, sits at 4.81 bids per award, based on 858 of 955 awards that reported a bid count (89.8% coverage). That places it in the middle of the distribution rather than at either extreme.
Where competition looks thin
The ten least competitive divisions all averaged fewer than 2.4 bids per award:
| Sector | Avg. bids | Awards reported | Coverage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Financial & insurance services (66) | 2.03 | 290 | 99.7% |
| Administration, defence & social security services (75) | 2.05 | 41 | 97.6% |
| Postal & telecommunications services (64) | 2.08 | 72 | 98.6% |
| Laboratory, optical & precision equipment (38) | 2.12 | 252 | 97.6% |
| Supporting & auxiliary transport services (63) | 2.14 | 43 | 100.0% |
| Industrial machinery (42) | 2.23 | 138 | 96.4% |
| Repair & maintenance services (50) | 2.28 | 376 | 99.2% |
| Construction structures, materials & products (44) | 2.35 | 163 | 99.4% |
| Health & social work services (85) | 2.38 | 106 | 98.1% |
Financial and insurance services stand out not only for the lowest average (2.03) but also for a large award volume — 290 contracts — and near-complete coverage (99.7%), making the figure robust. Repair and maintenance services (CPV 50) combine a similarly low average (2.28) with a substantial 376 awards at 99.2% coverage, suggesting thin competition is a consistent feature rather than a statistical artefact.
Health and social work services (CPV 85) average 2.38 bids across 106 awards (98.1% coverage). This sector is partly governed by a lighter EU procurement regime, which may reduce the pool of potential bidders.
What the numbers do — and do not — show
A low bid count does not automatically indicate a market failure. Highly specialised equipment, regulated professions, or framework agreements that pre-qualify suppliers can all legitimately reduce the field. Equally, a high average can mask individual lots that attracted only one or two offers. The figures here are averages across all reported awards within each CPV division.
Contracting authorities (the public bodies issuing tenders) and market-oversight bodies may nonetheless find the low-competition clusters worth examining, particularly in sectors — such as financial services and repair and maintenance — where the market structure does not obviously preclude broader participation.
Methodology
Data source: TED (EU Tenders Electronic Daily), restricted to Belgian contracting authorities. Metric: average number of bids (tenders received) per contract-award notice, calculated only over awards that reported a bid count. Coverage: the percentage of awards within each CPV division that disclosed a bid count is shown in the tables above; divisions where fewer than ten awards reported a bid count are excluded. Because reporting of bid counts is not mandatory in all cases, the averages reflect disclosed data only and may not be fully representative of all awarded contracts. No time range was specified in the underlying dataset extract used for this analysis.