For years, public procurement debates in Bangladesh have focused on roads, bridges, and buildings. But embedded inside the same e-GP system is another fast-growing market – digital hardware, software, and ICT services.
This analysis covers 219,766 contract awards issued between 2015 and 2025, with a combined value of about 157,858.00 crore BDT. Within this universe, 31,617 contracts are classified as ICT-related based on tender text.
Together, these ICT contracts are worth approximately 27,116.40 crore BDT. By count, ICT accounts for about 14.39% of all public contracts in the dataset. Digital government, in other words, is not just a policy goal – it is a procurement market worth tens of thousands of crores.
The Decade of Digital
ICT procurement in Bangladesh starts as a modest stream in 2015 and then swells into a multi-thousand-crore wave. The line chart below shows the total value of ICT awards per year.
The line rises from ৳346.848 crore in 2015 to ৳1,799.169 crore in 2018, then reaches a high point in 2023 at ৳4,684.815 crore.
In the most recent full years, ICT awards remain substantial: ৳3,144.024 crore in 2022, ৳4,684.815 crore in 2023, and ৳4,495.873 crore in 2024.
The dip in 2025 in this dataset is partly due to incomplete data for the year at the time of scraping; 2025 currently totals ৳1,886.361 crore.
Who Eats the Digital Pie?
Hundreds of firms appear at least once in ICT tenders. But when we rank them by the total value of ICT awards, a tight cluster of giants emerges at the top of the chart.
Smart Technologies (Bd) Ltd tells a different story. While its total ICT value is 482.28 crore BDT, its footprint comes from scale and reach: 279 ICT contracts spanning 52 ministries and divisions.
Joint ventures and specialised vendors follow, often appearing in large or technically complex projects such as data centres, enterprise networks or nationwide ICT platforms.
Which Ministries Feed the ICT Giants?
ICT firms do not just work for “the government” in the abstract. They win contracts from specific ministries and divisions, each with their own digital agendas and budgets.
The Ministry of Local Government, Rural Development and Co-operatives and Local Government Division emerges as the largest ICT spender in this dataset, reflecting digitisation of public services and system procurement across agencies.
Health, disaster management, housing, education and ICT-related ministries also channel large sums into digital systems, feeding a recurring set of major ICT vendors across multiple sectors.
Ministries → Firms: The Digital Highway
The next question is: where does the money come from? The Sankey diagram makes visible what is often hidden in PDFs and portal tables: a concentrated digital highway where public money flows from a handful of ministries to a tight club of ICT giants.
The flows shown here represent selected high-value relationships between major ministries and top ICT suppliers. They illustrate concentration at the top of the market, not the full universe of smaller ICT contracts.
The thickest flows lead to firms like Walton Digi-Tech and Smart Technologies, showing how the same suppliers sit at the centre of multiple ministries’ digital projects.
How Many Ministries Does Each Firm Touch?
Another way to measure influence is not just how much money a firm wins, but how many different ministries it serves.
This view ranks firms by how many distinct ministries/divisions they served (reach). Switch to compare by total ICT award value.
Smart Technologies (Bd) Ltd stands out for its cross-ministerial reach, appearing across 52 ministries and divisions.
The chart shows a classic pattern of digital concentration: a few firms span many ministries and big budgets, while many smaller firms remain confined to one or two agencies.
Winners, Risks and Red Flags
On paper, ICT procurement should be competitive – a space where new vendors and technologies can challenge incumbents. The data, however, shows a market where a small group of firms repeatedly captures large ICT contracts and maintains relationships across many ministries.
Concentration is not proof of corruption. Large ICT systems can genuinely require experienced vendors with technical capacity. But repeated wins by the same firms across ministries and years raise oversight questions: Are tender specifications written in ways that favour certain brands or vendors? Do joint ventures obscure underlying business or political links? Are repeat extensions limiting competition? Do oversight bodies have the capacity to scrutinise technical ICT deals where inflated pricing can hide inside complex specifications?
ICT procurement now represents a significant and permanent slice of Bangladesh’s public spending. Following this money – firm by firm, ministry by ministry – is essential not only to understand who is building the country’s digital infrastructure, but also to assess whether competition, transparency, and value for money are being protected in one of the fastest-growing segments of public procurement.
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.
A contract is classified as ICT-related if this combined text contains one or more case-insensitive keywords: ict, information, computer, software, network, server, database, laptop. This rule intentionally prioritises reproducibility and avoids subjective judgement. A limitation is that ICT work described using generic wording (for example “service improvement” without digital terms) may be missed, while a small number of false positives may be captured where keywords appear in a non-ICT context.
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.