The two-bidder problem: how often "public competition" is actually a coin flip

A founder pitching SMEs on a procurement-monitoring tool hears the same objection regularly: “Public tenders are fiercely competitive, we keep bidding and we keep losing.” The premise of that objection is that the field is crowded. I wanted to know whether it actually is. So I queried our SIMAP award table for every contract awarded in the last twelve months, kept only awards with a reported bidder count, and counted.

The answer surprised me. For roughly one in four Swiss public contracts in the rolling year, the buyer received two bidders or fewer. In some equipment-heavy categories, the rate climbs above 60%. SMEs that assume the field is too crowded to win are reading the market wrong.

The numbers

We pulled every award decision on simap.ch from the last twelve months where the buyer reported the number of submissions. The query covered 5’565 awards. Coverage is high: every award decision in the period carries a non-NULL bidder count, no analysable subset to disclose.

Statistic	Value
Awards analysed (rolling 12 months)	5’565
Median bidders per award	4
Average bidders per award	4.71
Sole-bidder awards	520 (9.3%)
Two-or-fewer-bidder awards	1’405 (25.2%)

A median of four bidders is not a thin field. But the distribution matters more than the average. One in eleven awards went to a sole bidder. One in four had two or fewer.

Procedure type is the strongest predictor

The variance across procedure types is wider than across anything else we measured.

Procedure	Awards	Median	Sole	≤2 bidders	% ≤2
Open (offen)	5’237	4	477	1’280	24.4%
Invitation (Einladungs)	253	3	33	107	42.3%
Selective (selektiv)	75	4	10	18	24.0%

Invitation procedures are 42% ≤2-bidder by design: the buyer invites a short list, and a short list can drop to two when one invitee declines. This is legally allowed under the WTO/GPA thresholds for sub-treaty procurement and entirely above board.

The genuine surprise is the open procedure: 24.4% ≤2 bidders. Open procedures are advertised publicly on simap.ch with the express intent of attracting wide competition. A quarter of them attract at most two bidders. The field is more open than SMEs assume.

CPV division: where the asymmetry lives

The CPV (Common Procurement Vocabulary) division is the strongest predictor of how thin the field is. Sorting by ≤2-bidder rate descending, the worst divisions (by SME opportunity, the best) are:

CPV2	Division	Awards	Median	% ≤2
38	Laboratory, optical and precision equipment	63	2	61.9%
34	Transport equipment	157	2	56.1%
31	Electrical machinery and lighting	147	3	48.3%
42	Industrial machinery	90	3	46.7%
66	Financial and insurance services	91	3	42.9%

Three observations stand out.

First, equipment categories cluster at the top. Specialised technical procurement (lab kit, vehicles, lighting systems) attracts thin fields because the supplier base is small. SMEs in these sectors face less competition than they assume.

Second, the field is bottom-heavy in volume. The two largest CPV divisions by award count are CPV 45 (construction works, 3’066 awards) at 19.9% ≤2-bidder rate and CPV 71 (architecture and engineering, 451 awards) at 19.3%. Most public-procurement spend sits in the more-competitive end. Most public-procurement opportunity, on a per-tender basis, sits in the less-competitive end.

Third, knowing your CPV division matters strategically. An SME in CPV 38 reading “public procurement is too competitive” is reading the wrong data. The data says the opposite.

Why this happens

Three forces compound to produce thin fields in equipment-heavy categories.

Specialisation narrows the supply side. A buyer that needs a specific precision-measurement instrument has, perhaps, five potential suppliers in the country. Three of those may be busy. Two end up bidding.

SMEs do not monitor enough channels. Cantonal portals, Einladungsverfahren, and amendments to existing tenders all leak opportunities away from SMEs who only check simap.ch when they remember to. The how SIMAP works post covers the gaps.

The qualification-readiness gap. Bids fail not on capability but on paperwork. An SME with a current Selbstdeklaration, verified references, and a pre-built qualification routine can bid on tenders that competitors abandon. SMEs without those operational basics simply do not bid, leaving the field to those who do.

What this changes for SMEs

The strategic implication: public-procurement competition is materially thinner than the conventional wisdom suggests, especially in equipment-heavy CPV divisions. SMEs that invest in monitoring (so they see the tender), qualifying (90 minutes of go/no-go discipline), and reference-list hygiene (the five-row template) compete in a field where the median number of competitors is four, and where one in four contracts has two or fewer bidders.

We built TenderLift to make the monitoring step affordable for SMEs. The fit-scoring tells you which tenders match your business profile; the alerts ensure you see them early enough to bid. The data above is the answer to “is it worth bidding at all?” For most SMEs in most categories, the honest answer is yes.

Methodology and caveats

The analysis covers SIMAP awards with a reported number_of_submissions value in the twelve months ending 28 May 2026, on the production TenderLift database. CPV divisions cited use the EU CPV 2008 nomenclature roots. We required at least 30 awards in a procedure type or CPV division to include the row in the breakdown (statistical noise filter). The rolling-12-month window will shift; we will refresh this analysis quarterly.

The ≤2-bidder rate should not be confused with a win-rate forecast: bidding into a thin field still requires meeting eligibility, writing a credible bid, and pricing defensibly. The data shows where the opportunity is, not where the bid writes itself.