public-interest investigations
public-interest investigations
At first glance public procurement in Bangladesh looks broad and competitive – thousands of companies, tens of thousands of tenders, and money spread across many ministries. But once we map who wins what, the picture becomes clearer: a small group of firms repeatedly capture large shares of the budget, while many others appear once and disappear.
Across 10 years – from 1 July, 2015 to 30 June, 2025 – Bangladesh’s public procurement system awarded — conratcs worth BDT— crore, involving — firms.
But the distribution is steep. — firms are one-time winners, together receiving BDT— crore – about of total value.
Meanwhile, the top 10 firms alone account for BDT— crore – around of total value. This “winner-takes-most” structure is a classic risk factor for weak competition and capture.
By total awarded value, a handful of firms tower over the rest. The biggest value-holders include —.
These firms are not only big – they are deeply embedded in the state. Some concentrate on a small cluster of ministries, while others spread across dozens of portfolios, becoming the “default” supplier for hardware and ICT.
The Sankey diagram below show the money flow. The top contract award winning firm details is being displayed by default. Click on a firm name in the table you will see ministry-wise money flow below the table. The Sankey will highlight only flows into the selected firm when you click a row in the top-10 list. Hover or tap a band to read a summary of that relationship.
Through the Sankey view, a few patterns stand out: (a) Big construction portfolios – such as Housing & Public Works, Local Government, (b) Roads & Highways, Energy & Power, and Shipping – feed the largest flows to the mega-builders.
ICT-heavy ministries and divisions repeatedly send money to firms like Smart Technologies (BD) Ltd. and Walton Digi-Tech Industries Limited. Some firms appear as thick bands from multiple ministries, indicating deep institutional embeddedness rather than one-off wins.
The Sankey does not, by itself, prove collusion or political favouritism. But it shows where scrutiny should begin: the firms at the receiving end of the thickest bands of public money.
When we switch from total value to number of contracts, a different group of winners surfaces. Instead of mega-construction and tech giants, the top ranks fill with traders and suppliers: — – firms that rack up hundreds of small awards.
Their total contract values are modest compared to the big builders, but they are ubiquitous in the system: stationery, minor civil works, office supplies, small equipment.
A few firms, however, straddle both worlds–winning in both volume and value. For example, — appears across — ministries/divisions, with — contracts worth a combined BDT— crore.
This split suggests two distinct procurement games: volume machines – firms thriving on repetitive, low- to mid-value awards, ideal for investigating framework contracts, rate agreements, and potentially under-scrutinised small tenders. value giants – firms that anchor major infrastructure, energy and building projects, where a single contract can be worth hundreds of crores.
We have also calculated a Herfindahl–Hirschman Index (HHI) for each ministry, a standard competition metric that sums the squared market shares of firms in a given market. In competition-policy guidelines, scores above 2,500 are typically considered “highly concentrated”.
Across this dataset, — ministries score above 2,500 (highly concentrated) and — fall in the 1,500–2,500 moderate range – out of — ministries/divisions with enough contracts to score. Among the highly concentrated group, the top supplier’s share ranges from to of ministry spending. The tightest example in this dataset is — (HHI —), where — holds about of recorded value.
There may be valid reasons – specialised technology, limited vendor pools, legacy systems that lock in one provider – but such patterns are also classic red flags for captured markets and entrenched vendors. These are the ministries where watchdogs and journalists should ask whether procurement rules are being used to keep out competitors.
| Ministry / Division | HHI | Firms | Top firm | Top firm share (%) | Risk band |
|---|
Taken together, the numbers show thousands of firms participate, but a small elite captures a disproportionate share of the money. Construction and ICT portfolios are particularly prone to concentration in a few repeat winners.
Several ministries exhibit high or extreme HHI scores, signalling potential competition risks.
The immediate question is straightforward: are we getting fair value for this money? When the same firms win again and again, it becomes easier for cartels to form, prices to be padded, or quality to suffer without consequences.
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.
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.