In Lithuania, one tender in three has no competition at all

A tender is supposed to be an argument between suppliers, settled by a buyer. When only one supplier turns up, the paperwork is still correct, the notice was still published, the file still passes an audit — and nothing has actually been decided. The buyer has not chosen; it has accepted. What makes this hard to discuss honestly is that almost nobody publishes the number of bids received, so the failure is invisible in exactly the places most likely to have it. Lithuania is the rare market where it can be counted, which is why this piece is about Lithuania.

The shape of the distribution is the finding

Across 2,311 Lithuanian notices published this year with a recorded bidder count, the mean is 2.41 bidders — a number that sounds like thin but functioning competition. The distribution says something else. The single most common outcome, by a wide margin, is exactly one bid: 833 notices, 36.0% of everything measured. Another 155 procedures drew no bids at all. Together that is well over four in ten procedures where the process produced either no choice or no offer. Meanwhile the genuinely competitive tail — five bidders or more — accounts for under 11%. This is not a market with a mild competition problem around the edges; it is a market where the modal tender is uncontested and the average is being propped up by a small number of unusually attractive contracts.

Plotted, the distribution says it more bluntly than any average can. The tallest column is one bid, and it is not close: the second-most common outcome does not come near it, and the genuinely crowded procedures sit out on the thin end of the tail.

It concentrates in specific institutions, not everywhere

Single bidding is not spread evenly, which is what makes it a fixable operational problem rather than a national condition. Among buyers with at least twenty measured notices, Vilniaus universitetas sits at 62% across 114 procedures, and the university hospital Santaros klinikos at 61% across 90. The state forestry enterprise runs at 56% of 41, the Police Department at 50% of 34, and Vilnius’s own central purchasing agency at 47% of 36. Set against that, Via Lietuva — the national road directorate, a buyer of large, standardised civil works — records a single-bidder rate of 8.9% with an average of 3.4 bidders and a supplier concentration index of 574, which is a competitive market by any reading. The same country, the same rules, the same year. What differs is what is being bought and how the requirement is written.

Why the rest of Europe cannot answer this question

The uncomfortable part of this analysis is how narrow it has to be. Lithuania appears here not because it is the worst performer but because it is one of the very few markets that publishes bid counts in a form anyone can aggregate. In Spain — a market where we hold notices worth billions and where coverage runs to the current day — the number of tenderers received is simply not carried through into structured data, so its single-bid rate cannot be stated at all. The same is true of Poland, Estonia, Finland, Norway and Romania. Any European league table of competition is therefore built on the handful of countries that happen to publish the field, and quietly presented as if it described the continent. It does not. The honest position is that procurement competition is largely unmeasured in Europe, and the few places it is measured do not look reassuring.

Data: Otnox — live procurement intelligence across 56 markets. Basis: Lithuanian notices carrying a recorded bidder count, national portal (lt_epps), 2026-01-01..2026-07-25.