Which European public markets buy from abroad? Foreign winners, country by country

Will public buyers in your first European country buy from a company that is not local? The award notices answer that country by country. We took every contract award for supplies on TED, the EU's public procurement journal, from November 2023 to October 2026, and compared the registered country of each winner with the country of the buyer.

Putting it simply: small, multilingual, English-friendly markets such as Ireland, Luxembourg, Austria, Denmark and Belgium award a visible share of supply contracts to foreign-registered companies. France, Italy, Spain and Poland award 98% or more to local firms. Germany is still the largest destination for US and Swiss winners. In most of Europe, a US product reaches a public buyer through a local distributor.

How we counted

The figures come from the Cresques database, computed on November 3, 2026, from the TED notice packages (see our methodology). The unit is an award line: one winner on one lot. A notice with ten lots and ten winners gives ten lines. We kept the 4,844,370 lines where both the buyer's country and the winner's registered country are known.

Two definitions matter:

• Foreign means the winner is registered in a different country than the buyer.
• Non-EEA means the winner is registered outside the EU and the European Economic Area. The EEA brings together the EU member states and Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway; Switzerland is not part of it. The UK has been outside the EU since the Withdrawal Agreement entered into force on February 1, 2020, and its transition period ended on December 31, 2020, so it is outside the EEA too. Swiss, British and US winners all count as non-EEA here.

The main caveat comes first. A foreign manufacturer that wins through a locally registered subsidiary counts as domestic. If a US group's Austrian GmbH wins a contract in Vienna, the notice shows an Austrian company and so do we. The "foreign share" therefore measures cross-border winners, not foreign-owned supply, which is larger.

Our country pages and playbooks use a different count (share of winners by notice, September 2025 to September 2026, excluding the medical, construction and health-services divisions), so the local shares there differ slightly from the figures here; Austria's page, for example, says 74% local.

The ranking: where foreign winners are most visible

The twelve buyer countries with the highest foreign share:

Sweden follows at 6.1% and Germany at 4.8%. Below them the shares fall quickly: Portugal 3.2%, Czechia 2.6%, France 1.7%, Italy, Spain and Poland 1.3% each, Croatia 0.5%, Bulgaria 0.3%, and Romania below 0.1%.

Luxembourg and Iceland publish few lines, so a handful of contracts can move their shares by several points.

Small, open, English-friendly markets

Most of these are smaller economies tied to a larger neighbor. Luxembourg buys across its borders with Belgium, France and Germany. Austria buys from Germany and Switzerland: Swiss-registered companies have 95 non-EEA lines there, ahead of the UK with 36 and the US with 26. In Denmark and Finland the largest foreign supplier country is their neighbor Sweden, with 921 and 736 lines. Denmark, Belgium and Finland show the same non-EEA mix, with the UK, the US and Switzerland as the largest sources, each in the tens of lines.

Ireland stands apart. Its foreign share is 20.9%, and most of that is non-EEA: 16.1% of all Irish award lines. The reason is one country. UK-registered companies have 780 lines in Ireland; US-registered companies have 22 and Swiss ones 14. Ireland's openness is mostly openness to British suppliers. Our Ireland playbook explains how Irish trade runs through distributors and merchant buying groups.

Malta has the second-highest non-EEA share, 2.73%, led by the UK with 21 lines and the United Arab Emirates with 7. The Netherlands has a lower foreign share, 6.3%, but its largest non-EEA source is the US, with 58 lines, ahead of the UK with 53.

Large markets buy at home

At the other end are the countries that publish the most contracts. France (86,267 lines), Spain (73,825), Italy (43,113) and Poland (332,715) all sit at 1.7% or below. Croatia, Bulgaria and Romania are lower still. Here almost every public supply contract goes to a company registered in the buyer's country.

That does not show they avoid imported products: a notice names the winner, not the maker of the goods. Imports reach these buyers through local distributors who bid in the local language and service equipment on site. For a US manufacturer, the realistic route into these markets is a local distributor that already wins in your category.

Germany: low share, large numbers

Germany's foreign share is only 4.8%, but the market is large: 73,931 award lines. In absolute terms it is the biggest destination for US and Swiss winners in this data. Swiss-registered companies have 279 lines there, US-registered companies 153, UK-registered 126 and Ukrainian-registered 70. The 153 US lines are more than in any other buyer country; our earlier post on where US manufacturers already win EU public contracts looks at what those winners sell.

Ireland actually has slightly more non-EEA lines in total than Germany, because of the UK. For US suppliers specifically, Germany leads by a wide margin. Our Germany playbook covers how German buyers and distributors work.

Why counting lines can mislead

An award-line count gives more weight to countries that split their purchases into many lines. Romania accounts for 3,745,223 of the 4,844,370 lines, about 77% of the total, largely because its notices record many call-offs under framework agreements as separate contracts. Polish buyers often split medical tenders into many lots, so one procedure can produce dozens of lines. Both inflate the domestic weight of any Europe-wide total. Outside Romania, the remaining 1.1 million lines have a foreign share of about 2.6%.

So read the table country by country: compare shares, not counts.

A trade agreement opens the door, not the market

One external fact explains why US winners can appear at all. The EU, with its 27 member states, and the United States are both parties to the WTO Agreement on Government Procurement (GPA), whose aim, in the WTO's words, is "to mutually open government procurement markets among its parties." The coverage is limited, though: the rules apply only to procurement by entities each party lists, for listed goods and services, above specified threshold values. Whether a given tender is covered depends on those schedules, so check with a procurement adviser before relying on GPA access for a specific bid. Formal access is one thing; in most countries buyers still choose a local supplier.

What this means for a US manufacturer

If your first European market is small and English-friendly, such as Ireland, Austria, Belgium or Denmark, the record shows that buyers there do award contracts across borders, though mostly to companies from neighboring countries and the UK. Our Austria and Belgium playbooks describe how those markets buy.

If your target is France, Spain, Italy, Poland or another large southern or eastern market, plan on a local distributor from day one. Cross-border winners there take under 2% of award lines, European suppliers included. In Germany, direct US wins exist and are the most numerous in Europe, but they are still a small share; for everyday products a German distributor remains the normal route.

Cresques builds that shortlist from the same notices: 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 the notices behind it. A full company profile shows every award with its buyer and researches whether the company is an independent distributor or a manufacturer's subsidiary, with quotes checked on its own pages. See Cresques for US manufacturers and pricing.