One bidder, one winner: a fifth of Germany’s EU-wide contracts had no competition

Every EU-wide contract award notice states how many tenders were received. Read across the whole record, it answers a question buyers rarely ask out loud: how often does a public tender attract exactly one bidder — which is to say, no competition at all?

Germany sits in the lower half: 20.6% of awards with a known bidder count went to the only bidder, the median award saw three offers. That is not a story about the quality of German procurement. It is a story about what gets bought.

The pattern is the same everywhere we looked: the more specialised the thing being bought, the more often only one supplier turns up. Mass spectrometers, fire engines, specialist software — markets with two or three capable vendors, one of whom already holds the maintenance contract. Construction, cleaning and planning are markets with thousands of capable firms, and the bidder counts show it.

Why it matters for a bidder: the single-bidder rate is the cheapest signal of where competition is thin. It is published, it is per buyer, and we show it on every tender we hold — how many bid last time at this buyer, in this sector, and who won. For a small firm, a 40% single-bidder sector is not a warning sign. It is an invitation.