German public medical contracts on TED: 7,202 awards in 12 months, most of them insurers' drug rebate deals

In twelve months, German public buyers published 7,202 awards for medical supplies on TED, and 5,227 of them came from statutory health insurers buying medicines. That changes how the German numbers should be read. The hospital and device side is on TED too, but much smaller there than the German health system would suggest.

Putting it simply: between 1 November 2025 and 6 November 2026, buyers in Germany published 1,326 award notices for medical supplies (CPV division 33), with 7,202 individual awards won by 803 companies. About 73% of those awards were made by 20 statutory health insurers and their procurement companies, almost all for pharmaceuticals, and the most frequent winners are pharmaceutical companies and their bidding consortia. The device side, without medicines, accounts for 1,788 awards from 321 buyers, won mostly by the German subsidiaries of global manufacturers and a few distributors. 5.2% of all awards went to companies registered outside Germany.

How we counted

Cresques reads TED contract award notices for supplies from the daily and monthly notice packages (see our methodology). For this post we took notices from buyers in Germany published between 1 November 2025 and 6 November 2026, with a main CPV code in division 33 (medical equipment, pharmaceuticals and personal care products). We used the same evidence rules as the app: only live notices (versions replaced by a correction are left out), an award repeated by a later notice of the same procedure is counted once, and only awards named in a concluded contract count. The figures were computed on 8 November 2026.

Four caveats matter for reading the numbers:

• An award is not a tender and not an amount of money. An award is one winner on one lot or contract line. The typical German notice is small: the median notice carries one award. A few insurer tenders carry hundreds, up to 515 in one notice.
• We do not total values, and in Germany most awards have none. 5,847 of the 7,202 awards (81%) were published without a contract value, which is common for rebate contracts. Only 768 carry an awarded value; the rest are estimates, framework ceilings or amounts we flag as unconfirmed.
• A foreign group's German subsidiary counts as German. When Philips GmbH or Medtronic GmbH wins, the notice shows a German company, and so do we. The 5.2% measures direct wins by foreign-registered entities.
• Roles are researched for a subset. Where we describe a company as a distributor or a manufacturer's subsidiary, that comes from Cresques' AI-researched classification, with quotes checked on the company's own pages. Where we give no role, it is not yet researched in our data.

Two markets in one division

Split by buyer, division 33 in Germany falls into two very different groups:

Twenty insurer buyers produce 72.6% of the awards (5,227 of 7,202), and 5,207 of their 5,227 awards (99.6%) sit in CPV class 3360, pharmaceutical products. The largest are PBMG eG (1,562 awards), Techniker Krankenkasse (1,007), DAK-Gesundheit (909), GWQ ServicePlus AG (553), IKK classic (489), BARMER (240), KKH (227) and AOK Baden-Württemberg (203). GWQ says on its own site that it develops solutions "together with 74 health insurers" (Gemeinsam mit 74 Krankenkassen) and mentions drug rebate contracts (Arzneimittel-Rabattverträge) there.

The legal basis is § 130a(8) of the Fifth Book of the German Social Code (SGB V). It says that health insurers or their associations "can agree rebates with pharmaceutical companies" for the medicines dispensed at their expense, and that such agreements "should run for two years" (sentences 1 and 8). For off-patent medicines it builds on public procurement law: it ties the start of supply to the award notification under § 134 of the Act against Restraints of Competition (GWB) and refers to agreements subject to Part 4 of the GWB, the procurement part. That is why these contracts are awarded in procurement procedures and appear on TED as award notices, mostly without a published value.

By CPV class of the notice, the division looks like this:

The insurer tenders also make the calendar uneven: March 2026 alone had 1,328 awards from 320 notices, and August 2026 had 1,232 awards from only 80 notices.

Who wins the insurers' contracts

The most frequent winners in the whole division are pharmaceutical companies and their bidding consortia. Several describe themselves as generics makers on their own sites: ratiopharm ("hochwertige Generika") and Zentiva ("ein führendes europäisches Generika-Pharmaunternehmen"), for example.

The entries starting with "BG" are bidding consortia (Bietergemeinschaft, set up as a civil-law partnership, GbR) of the companies named: ALIUD and STADAPHARM in one, 1 A Pharma and Hexal in another, Heumann and Heunet in a third (76 awards). Each wins with a handful of buyers, because there are only about 20 insurer buyers. The top five winners hold 17.7% of all awards and the top twenty 36.2%, a less concentrated picture than the buyer side.

Among award rows where the number of offers is reported, 21.8% of the 7,186 rows had exactly one offer; counted by distinct lot, 32.3%. In pharmaceuticals the award-row share is 20.0%.

The hospital and device side

Leaving out the medicine classes (3360, 3365, 3368 and 3369), German buyers made 1,788 awards in 667 notices from 321 buyers, 24.8% of the division. Here the buyers are hospital purchasing groups and public bodies. The largest non-insurer buyers include the contract facilities of Prospitalia GmbH in Ulm (546 awards in 19 notices), the Bundeswehr's Federal Office of Infrastructure, Environmental Protection and Services in Bonn (148), EK-UNICO GmbH in Münster (112), the Berlin fire brigade (40), the health facilities of EKK plus GmbH in Cologne (40), AGKAMED GmbH in Essen (32) and Sana Einkauf & Logistik GmbH (21). Single university hospitals (Munich, Aachen, Hamburg-Eppendorf) appear with a few dozen awards or fewer.

The winners are mostly the German companies of global manufacturers:

Distributors are present but few near the top: Balmung Medical Handel and MTW Medizintechnik Werder are classified as distributors, and Hestomed & Helbig Medizintechnik and P.J. Dahlhausen as manufacturers that also distribute. One offer per award row is reported in 24.3% of 1,772 device rows.

A small TED footprint does not mean German hospitals buy little. As of 8 November 2026 we could not measure how much of their purchasing runs below the EU thresholds or through call-offs under purchasing groups' framework agreements, which are not each published as a separate award notice. Both probably keep much hospital buying off TED, so these figures describe the visible top of the market.

Where foreign companies win directly

Foreign-registered companies won 5.2% of the awards, and the pattern follows the two markets. By country:

On the medicine side, the largest foreign winners take part in insurer tenders. Abacus Medicine A/S from Denmark (64 awards across the division) calls itself the "second largest parallel importer in Europe", and its group lists Originalis B.V. from the Netherlands for parallel distribution in Germany; the axicorp group, whose axicorp Pharma B.V. also wins, presents itself as a provider of parallel and re-imports of EU medicines. Vivanta Generics s.r.o. from Czechia (49 awards in pharmaceuticals) belongs to a generics group, and Cipla Europe NV from Belgium also appears among the winners. On the device side, the foreign share is 3.9%, and the largest foreign winner is Balmung Medical Handel GmbH from Austria, a distributor in our data, with 27 awards.

Over a longer window, since November 2023 German buyers made 71,193 supply awards across all CPV divisions, and 95.2% went to companies registered in Germany. In medical supplies the figure is 96.5% of 18,672 awards.

What this means for a manufacturer

A medicines maker and a device maker see two different German markets on TED. For medicines, the route is the insurers' rebate tenders, which are open to foreign bidders and already won by companies from Denmark, Czechia and the Netherlands. For devices and consumables, the visible winners are the German subsidiaries of global groups, and many of the buyers are purchasing groups that run tenders for hospitals. A manufacturer without a German company usually enters through a German distributor, and the device notices show which distributors already win with which buyers. Our guide to entering Germany through distributors and the Germany market page explain the channel and the outreach rules.

In Cresques you create a market from a country and up to five CPV categories and see the companies that won public supply contracts in them, each linked to its notices. A full company profile (4 credits) shows every award with its buyer and date and researches what kind of company it is, distributor, manufacturer or a manufacturer's subsidiary, with quotes checked on its own pages. In Germany that step separates the subsidiaries you compete with from the distributors who could carry your products.