Concrete Cartel – Bangladesh’s Construction Contractor Network
Between 2015 and 2025, Bangladesh government awarded77,921 construction-related contracts, worth ৳87,914.6 crore BDT in total.
Across this construction universe, 13,496 firms won at least one matched contract. 4,973 firms appear only once, but repeat winners dominate the spending: firms winning from 3+ ministries/divisions captured about 52.3% of total construction value (1,627 firms).
Two different kinds of dominance show up in the rankings. By total value, National Development Engineers Ltd leads with about ৳3,160.4 crore across 56 contracts, followed by Spectra Engineers LTD with ৳2,195.6 crore over 7 contracts.
But the most frequent winners are different: Muhammad Aminul Haque (pvt.) LTD won 524 contracts (about ৳680.5 crore), followed by Abaid Monsur Constructions with 259 contracts (about ৳251.4 crore).
On the buyer side, spending is concentrated in a handful of portfolios. The biggest spender is Ministry of Local Government, Rural Development and Co-operatives and Local Government Division (about ৳33,828.3 crore across 37,520 awards), followed by Ministry of Road Transport and Bridges and Road Transport and Highways Division (৳16,165.2 crore; 6,480 awards) and Ministry of Housing and Public Works (৳11,814.4 crore; 10,709 awards).
The charts below break down which firms dominate by value, which firms repeat across ministries, and how much of each ministry’s construction budget flows to cross-ministry winners.
Top firms by total awarded value
Treemap — who holds the concrete money?
A small set of contractors dominates Bangladesh’s public construction market year after year. Some firms repeatedly win across an unusually wide portfolio – in some cases across 10, 12, even 14 ministries.
Firms working across the most ministries (Top 10 by ministry count)
| Firm | Ministries | Contracts | Value (crore BDT) |
|---|
These firms function as national “go‑to” suppliers: when large volumes of work need to move, the same names recur across agencies.
In a healthier, more competitive market, we would expect more diversity – and more specialized suppliers across different types of works.
Who takes the biggest share?
Another way to assess contractor power is to look beyond “reach” (how many ministries a firm touches) and focus on total value. Among cross‑ministry firms, a handful capture a very large share of construction spending.
Top cross-ministry firms by total value (Top 10)
| Firm | Ministries | Contracts | Total value (crore BDT) |
|---|
For some firms, both patterns hold: they have broad reach (many ministries) and deep capture (hundreds to thousands of crore in awards). These firms sit at the center of the construction network.
The ministries that share the same contractor pool
On the other side of the network are the big‑spending ministries. Housing, Local Government, Roads & Bridges, Education, and Health repeatedly award a large portion of construction work to the same cross‑ministry firms.
Major construction-buying ministries and their reliance on cross-ministry firms
| Ministry / Division | Construction contracts | Total value (crore BDT) | Contracts with 3+ ministry firms | Value to 3+ ministry firms (crore BDT) | Share of value to 3+ ministry firms (%) |
|---|
When multiple ministries repeatedly rely on the same contractor pool, it raises questions about supplier selection and whether new entrants have a realistic path into the market.
In the interactive network below, ministries/divisions are on the left and firms are on the right. Each line represents at least one construction award between a ministry and a firm. For readability, we show the top 40 cross‑ministry firms by total value.
What next?
This analysis does not, by itself, prove collusion or corruption. But it clearly shows persistent concentration and repeat‑winner patterns in public construction awards – patterns that invite deeper reporting:
Ownership: Who ultimately owns the biggest cross‑ministry firms? Do directors or shareholders include politically exposed persons?
Procurement method: Do these firms win mostly through open tenders, or through limited/direct/negotiated procedures?
Performance record: Are any linked to cost overruns, contract amendments, blacklisting, or audit objections?
Concrete Cartel is a starting point. It shows where power concentrates in construction procurement. The next step is to investigate who sits behind that power – and how it is used.
Methodology & limitations
This investigation is based on analysis of public procurement award notices published through Bangladesh’s electronic Government Procurement (e-GP) system. The unit of analysis is an awarded contract record as it appears in the dataset: who awarded it, who received it, when it was awarded, and the awarded value captured in the record.
Before analysis, supplier names were standardised to reduce duplicate spellings that can fragment a single firm into multiple entries. This standardisation removed common prefixes (for example, M/S or Messrs), trimmed inconsistent punctuation and spacing, and unified common legal forms (for example, Limited vs Ltd; Private vs Pvt). These steps aim to make firm-level counts more reliable, but they cannot fully resolve deeper identity issues such as ownership changes, subsidiaries, or firms with genuinely similar names.
Joint ventures and consortium-style awards were excluded from the calculations shown here. In award-to fields, multi-party arrangements often appear as “JV”, “Joint Venture”, or as paired names separated by characters such as “/”, “&”, “and”, or hyphenated partner listings. Rather than attempting to split these awards across partners – an approach that can introduce new errors – this story removes them so repeat-winner and concentration patterns reflect awards to single suppliers only.
Contract values were analysed using the cleaned value field in the dataset and summarised in crore BDT. Records with missing or non-numeric value entries were excluded from value totals but could still contribute to simple counts where appropriate. All year-by-year totals, firm totals, and ministry totals in the narrative and charts are computed from the same cleaned dataset so that numbers remain internally consistent across the page.
We classified an award as construction‑related using keyword matching against the official tender text field. A contract entered the construction subset if that text contained one or more construction indicators such as “construction”, “civil works”, “RCC”, “concrete”, “road”, “bridge”, “culvert”, “embankment”, “drainage”, or “foundation” (case‑insensitive). This rule captures the bulk of civil works and building packages but can miss contracts that describe construction using unusual wording, and it can include a small number of false positives where the same terms are used in a different context.
Several measures in this story describe concentration and repeat‑winner structure. “One‑time winners” are firms that appear exactly once in the construction subset, while “repeat winners” appear more than once. “3+ ministry firms” are suppliers that won construction awards from at least three distinct ministries/divisions within the analysis window shown in the story. The “captured by multi‑ministry firms” share is the fraction of total construction value awarded to these 3+ ministry firms, computed within the same construction subset.
Because the story relies on administrative award data, it cannot directly measure the competitiveness of bidding (for example, how many firms submitted bids, how evaluation scores were assigned, or whether specifications were restrictive) unless those fields are available and linked.