The share of awards going to suppliers who have never won before is the closest thing procurement has to a measure of openness. It is also rarely looked at, because it requires holding a market’s whole history in view rather than reading one notice at a time. Doing that across the Baltic states this summer produces a more encouraging number than the concentration figures suggest, and a more complicated one than it first appears.
New names are not the same as new competition
384 first-time winners out of 1,500 awards looks like a market with genuinely open doors, and in aggregate it is. The distribution complicates it. The overwhelming majority of those 384 appear exactly once — a single contract, often small, and then silence. Meanwhile the top of the list is not a company at all: the two busiest newcomers are individual named persons, taking 28 and 19 awards respectively, each from one buyer. A person appearing from nothing to win nineteen contracts from a single institution is not evidence of a market opening up; it is a supply relationship that has become visible in the record for the first time, which is a different event entirely.
Ranked by how much each newcomer won, the top of the list is two individuals working for a single buyer apiece — and the genuinely open categories are further down.
| First-time winner | Awards since June | Buyers |
|---|---|---|
| Silvijus Abramavičius | 28 | 1 |
| Dalia Akramienė | 19 | 1 |
| Linea libera | 11 | 4 |
| SVK Grupė | 10 | 2 |
| MB FrigusLT | 9 | 1 |
| Narbutas Lietuva | 9 | 2 |
| TEC Infrastructure | 5 | 1 |
| MB Dongita | 5 | 2 |
Where the door is genuinely open
The more useful entries are the ones in the middle of the list, where a new name has won from several different buyers: Linea libera with eleven awards across four institutions, SVK Grupė with ten across two, Narbutas Lietuva with nine across two. Winning repeatedly from one buyer can mean many things, including that the buyer had no alternative. Winning from several within a season is much harder to explain by anything other than a competitive offer, and it is the pattern worth watching for anyone trying to identify which categories are actually contestable. It is also the pattern most likely to survive: single-buyer newcomers frequently vanish again when that buyer’s requirement changes.
A person appearing from nothing to win nineteen contracts from one institution is not a market opening up. It is a relationship becoming visible.
WHY IT MATTERS
First-time-winner share is the counterweight to concentration, and the two should always be read together: a market can have both a heavily entrenched incumbent and a steady trickle of newcomers, and it usually does. The number to distrust is a newcomer winning many contracts from exactly one buyer, which describes a supply arrangement rather than a contest. The number worth acting on is a newcomer winning from several buyers at once, because that is where a requirement has turned out to be genuinely open to whoever answers it best. Counting either one requires a market’s full award history, which is precisely why almost nobody counts them.
Data: Otnox — live procurement intelligence across 56 markets. Basis: awarded contracts with a named winner, Latvia and Lithuania; first-time winners defined as absent from January-May awards, 2026-06-01..2026-07-26.
