Incumbency is the hardest thing to see from outside a public market. Any single award looks reasonable on its own — the supplier was compliant, the price was acceptable, the file is in order. The pattern only appears once contracts stop being read one at a time and someone counts who is standing at the end of each of them, over a year, at the same buyer. Do that and some institutions turn out to be running something much closer to a standing arrangement than a series of competitions.
What 3,130 means
The Herfindahl-Hirschman index is the standard way competition authorities measure how concentrated a market is: square each participant’s percentage share and add them up. Anything above 2,500 is treated as highly concentrated in merger review — the level at which regulators start asking whether a market still disciplines its participants. The National Food and Veterinary Risk Assessment Institute scores 3,130 across 176 awards this year, with a single supplier, Bioeksma, holding 72 of them. That is not a market with a strong incumbent. By the standard the competition authorities themselves use, it is a market that has stopped being one, and it got there without a single decision anyone would describe as improper.
Ranked by how much of a buyer goes to its single busiest supplier, the spread is wider than any average of the group would suggest — and the busiest buyer on the list is not the most concentrated one.
| Buyer | Awards | Top supplier | Their share | HHI |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nacionalinis maisto ir veterinarijos rizikos vertinimo institutas | 176 | Bioeksma | 41% | 3,130 |
| VšĮ Vilniaus pirkimų agentūra | 53 | Furnistilius | 42% | 1,997 |
| Uždaroji akcinė bendrovė Vilniaus vystymo kompanija | 20 | Ekskomisarų biuras | 30% | 1,450 |
| Priešgaisrinės apsaugos ir gelbėjimo departamentas | 17 | Teksnija | 29% | 1,557 |
| Valstybės sienos apsaugos tarnyba | 17 | Telekonta | 29% | 1,419 |
| Via Lietuva | 112 | VIAMATIKA | 24% | 882 |
The pattern is not the same as the size
Concentration and volume are independent, which is what makes this worth checking rather than assuming. Via Lietuva, the national road directorate, is by far the busiest buyer on this list at 112 awards, and it is also the healthiest: its top supplier holds 24% and its index sits at 882, comfortably inside what any regulator would call competitive. Meanwhile Vilnius’s own central purchasing agency, at less than half the volume, hands 42% of its awards to one furniture supplier. Buying a lot does not concentrate a market and buying little does not protect it. What appears to matter is how specific the requirement is: road works are standardised and attract a field, while laboratory reagents and office furniture drift towards whoever already supplies them.
Why a seller should read this before a tender document
For a supplier deciding where to spend a bid budget, a concentration figure is a better filter than a value figure. A buyer publishing large contracts with an index above 2,500 is signalling, without meaning to, that its awards have a habitual destination and that a rival bid is likely to serve as the competitive cover that makes the file look complete. The same effort aimed at a buyer sitting under 1,000 is aimed at a genuine contest. None of this proves anything improper — incumbents win repeatedly for good reasons too, and switching costs in laboratory supply are real. But the seller who checks the pattern before writing the bid is making a decision, and the one who does not is making a donation.
It is not a market with a strong incumbent. By the regulators’ own threshold, it has stopped being a market.
WHY IT MATTERS
Concentration is the cheapest available test of whether a public buyer is still shopping, and it is almost never applied. A share above forty per cent at a single supplier does not prove anything improper — incumbents win repeatedly for legitimate reasons, and switching costs in laboratory supply are real — but it does mean the procedure has a habitual destination, and competing bids function as cover rather than contest. For the buyer the cost is a price no one tested; for the market it is a slow narrowing of the field, since suppliers who lose repeatedly stop appearing. The point at which this is cheap to correct is the specification, not the award: a requirement written narrowly enough to have one realistic answer will keep producing one.
Data: Otnox — live procurement intelligence across 56 markets. Basis: awarded contracts with a named winner, Lithuania, buyers with at least 15 awards in the period, 2026-01-01..2026-07-26.
