The Tender Game – How Competitive Is Bangladesh’s Public Procurement?
Across 10 years – From 1 July, 2015 to 30 June, 2025 – Bangladesh’s public procurement system awarded 219,766 contracts to 20,799 firms across 67 ministries and divisions, with a combined value of about BDT 157,858.00 crore.
Yet the national picture is far from evenly distributed. The top 10 firms together captured about BDT 13,626 crore – roughly 8.6% of the total awarded value.
On the buyer side, concentration is even sharper: the top 10 ministries account for about 78.2% of all awarded value.
The value leaderboard is dominated by firms that win fewer contracts, but each win is large. For example: National Development Engineers Ltd. leads with about BDT 3,292 crore across 70 contracts, followed by Spectra Engineers LTD. with BDT 2,251 crore from 8 contracts, and Kusholi Nirmata Limited with about BDT 1,207 crore across 54 contracts.
The frequency leaderboard tells a different story – it is dominated by repeat winners who rack up hundreds of contracts. Babor Associates tops the list with 830 contracts (about BDT 261 crore), while Amanat Enterprise follows with 589 contracts (about BDT 631 crore).
A small number of “hybrid” players show up in both lists – combining very high volume with high total value – and become central nodes in the procurement ecosystem.
Each bubble represents a firm. Larger bubbles indicate higher total awarded value. Firms positioned higher have won more contracts. Hover (or tap) to see exact figures.
Firms like National Development Engineers Ltd.., Spectra Engineers Ltd.., and Toma Construction & CO. Limited dominate the value leaderboard. They handle large civil works or high-value supply contracts, often tied closely to specific ministries.
A different set of firms – such as Babor Associates, Mohammed Eunus & Brothers (Pvt.) Ltd.., and M/S. J S Enterprise – dominates when we look at frequency. These companies win hundreds of smaller contracts, especially in supplies and ICT.
Each bubble represents a firm. Larger bubbles indicate more contracts won. Firms positioned higher received higher total awarded value. Hover (or tap) for details.
Pipelines of Power: Ministries Feeding Firms
Some ministries form especially large, repeated spending corridors to specific firms. In this selected view, the largest single ministry→firm pipeline is from Ministry of Road Transport and Bridges and Road Transport and Highways Division to National Development Engineers Ltd – about BDT 1,336 crore across 24 contracts.
Other major corridors include Ministry of Road Transport and Bridges and Road Transport and Highways Division → Spectra Engineers LTD (about BDT 1,127 crore) and Ministry of Housing and Public Works → Spectra Engineers LTD (about BDT 1,123 crore).
These are not occasional transactions – they are sustained, multi-hundred-crore relationships that can shape who repeatedly wins in high-stakes portfolios.
In other words, a cluster of just six firms captures several thousand crore in contracts from this ministry alone.
These thick pipelines suggest that, for major works and supplies, the field narrows quickly. Once a ministry “settles” into a stable set of preferred suppliers, new entrants face a steep uphill climb.
Some firms receive flows from many different ministries – a sign of broad reach.
Others appear tightly bound to a single division, suggesting a more exclusive relationship. In both cases, repeated pairings between the same buyer and supplier reduce the feel of open competition.
Ministry Network: Who Shares Suppliers?
Ministries don’t buy in isolation – they often draw from overlapping pools of suppliers. In the top-10-ministry network shown below, the biggest overlap is between Ministry of Local Government, Rural Development and Co-operatives and Local Government Division and Ministry of Housing and Public Works, which share 1,599 suppliers.
Other large overlaps include Ministry of Local Government, Rural Development and Co-operatives and Local Government Division with Ministry of Education and Secondary and Higher Education Division (1,592 shared suppliers), and with Ministry of Education (1,245). Ministry of Housing and Public Works also shares 836 suppliers with the Ministry of Education and Secondary and Higher Education Division.
Large overlaps suggest that the same businesses repeatedly operate across multiple policy domains – and that supplier pools can be tightly shared among big-spending portfolios.
The ministries responsible for infrastructure and urban services sit at the centre of this graph. Their supplier lists overlap heavily, creating tight clusters where the same firms appear again and again – even when different ministries sign the contracts.
This shared-supplier network can cut two ways: it may reflect a limited pool of capable firms, but it can also mean that once a supplier enters the overlapping “club” of major ministries, it can win work far beyond a single niche.
Which Ministries Favour Which Firms?
The heatmap highlights which ministries “favour” which firms – where very large sums concentrate into a small number of ministry–supplier relationships. The darkest cells correspond to the biggest corridors in the system.
The top corridors include: Ministry of Road Transport and Bridges and Road Transport and Highways Division → National Development Engineers Ltd (BDT 1,336 crore), Ministry of Housing and Public Works → Spectra Engineers LTD (BDT 1,123 crore), and Ministry of Local Government, Rural Development and Co-operatives and Local Government Division → National Development Engineers Ltd (BDT 1,056 crore).
The Ministry of Housing and Public Works shows several especially large supplier relationships in this selected view: about BDT 1,123 crore to Spectra Engineers LTD, BDT 910 crore to Padma Associates & Engineers Ltd., BDT 834 crore to Noorani Construction Ltd, and BDT 830 crore to Banga Builders Limited.
Other large corridors in the same matrix include BRB Cable Industries Ltd. receiving about BDT 791 crore from the Power Division, and Md. Moyenuddin (Bashi) Limited receiving about BDT 885 crore from the Road Transport and Highways portfolio.
Taken together, the heatmap shows that many ministries are not spreading their spending evenly across a large field of competitors. Instead, they often have one or a handful of favourite firms that capture the lion’s share of the money.
The Tender Game Scoreboard
At the top sits “All Bangladesh Awards”, representing BDT 157,858 crore in total value. Beneath it, the biggest spending portfolios are: Ministry of Local Government, Rural Development and Co-operatives and Local Government Division (BDT 42,486 crore), Ministry of Housing and Public Works (BDT 18,359 crore), Ministry of Road Transport and Bridges and Road Transport and Highways Division (BDT 16,657 crore), and Ministry of Energy, Power and Minearal Resources and Power Division (BDT 12,377 crore).
Scope note: Selected view shows only the top 10 ministries and a curated set of major firms within them. “Full universe” covers all ministries and allocates each ministry’s total across its top firms (plus an “Other firms” bucket), so totals match the full dataset.
The ministries of Shipping, Education, Health and Family Welfare, Disaster Management & Relief, Civil Aviation & Tourism, and Agriculture form the rest of the top-spending group.
In some ministries, a single supplier block dominates the interior; in others, the space is more fragmented. The visual message is simple: public money is not evenly shared.
So, How Competitive Is Bangladesh’s Tender Game?
The data does not directly tell us whether laws were broken or collusion took place. But it does paint a consistent picture of high concentration and repeated pairing. A tiny share of firms – just 10 – captures of all award value. One firm alone wins 830 contracts, and a cluster of others win hundreds more.
Ministries like Local Government, Housing and Public Works, Roads, and the Power Division share hundreds of suppliers with each other, creating an inner circle of firms that move fluidly between them.
Within individual ministries, a handful of firms often receive several hundred crore taka each, dwarfing the rest of the field.
In a healthy competitive market, we would expect to see a broader distribution of value, more churn in the list of winners, and fewer instances where one firm dominates a ministry’s spending. Instead, Bangladesh’s procurement data shows a system where opportunity is heavily tilted towards a relatively small set of incumbents.
That doesn’t mean every contract is unfair – but it does mean the risk of complacency, collusion, and informal gate-keeping is structurally built into how the system works.
Without proactive transparency – such as publishing bidder counts, open firm-level histories, and red-flag indicators for ministries that repeatedly award to the same suppliers – the Tender Game is likely to stay what it currently looks like in the data: a game where a few players hold most of the cards, and most firms never get beyond the starting line.
In public procurement, concentration itself is a risk. It invites complacency, invites collusion, and shuts out new entrants who might deliver better prices or better quality. A more competitive procurement system should publish bidder counts, reveal full firm-level histories, and flag ministries that repeatedly award to the same suppliers.
Until then, the Tender Game will remain a game – one that most firms never even get to play.
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.
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.