How to read a TED contract award notice as market intelligence

Every working day, public bodies across the EU announce who they have just bought from. Those announcements are not written for exporters, but they are the most reliable public record of which companies actually sell a given category in a given country. Reading one notice is trivia; reading a year of them for your category is a map.

Putting it simply: a contract award notice tells you that a named buyer bought a named category from a named company, when, and roughly for how much. It does not tell you whether that company is a reseller or a manufacturer, how much it really invoiced, or who to call. Use it to find the players, then verify.

What TED is

TED (Tenders Electronic Daily) is "the online version of the 'Supplement to the Official Journal' of the EU, dedicated to European public procurement". More than 3,000 notices are published on it every working day, with information in the 24 official EU languages. Publication there is a legal obligation for contracts above the EU thresholds; some Member States also publish below-threshold notices voluntarily.

For 2026-2027 the thresholds under Directive 2014/24/EU are EUR 140,000 for supplies and services bought by central government and EUR 216,000 for other contracting authorities (Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2025/2152). Anything smaller may or may not appear.

What a contract award notice is

Directive 2014/24/EU, Article 50(1): "Not later than 30 days after the conclusion of a contract or of a framework agreement, following the decision to award or conclude it, contracting authorities shall send a contract award notice on the results of the procurement procedure." So an award notice is published after the decision, and it describes a purchase that has already been made.

Since 25 October 2023, all notices are published in the eForms format established by Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2019/1780 (the old standard forms were repealed on that date). eForms are structured data: every piece of information has a named field, called a business term, and that is what makes systematic reading possible.

The fields that matter

Here are the business terms worth knowing, with the eForms codes you will see in the developer documentation.

The buyer. Organisation name and identifier (BT-500, BT-501). The buyer tells you the segment: a university hospital, a municipality, a ministry, a central purchasing body buying for many authorities.

The lot. Larger procedures are split into lots, each with its own title and CPV code (the EU's product classification). The lot is the level at which you learn what was bought: "office seating" rather than "furniture".

The winner. The organisation behind the winning tender, named in the contract section of the notice. One caution from practice: some notices list every tenderer in the lot result and only the contract section names the actual winner, so the concluded contract is the reliable place to read.

The values. Three different numbers can appear: the buyer's estimated value (BT-27), the winning tender's value (BT-720) and, for framework agreements, the framework maximum value (BT-271). They mean different things, and a framework maximum is a ceiling, not a sale. Buyers who do not want to publish an amount sometimes type a placeholder such as 0 or 1.

Framework agreement flag. BT-765 says whether the award is a framework agreement, under which the buyer will place orders over time, rather than a single purchase.

Dates. Contract conclusion date (BT-145), winner decision date (BT-1451), and the contract's duration: start date, end date or a period (BT-536, BT-537, BT-36), with a maximum number of renewals (BT-58).

Competition. The number of tenders received for the lot (BT-759), sometimes broken down by SME and foreign bidders.

What a year of notices tells you

Read all award notices for one country and one CPV category over twelve months and you can answer questions no directory can:

• Who sells this category to institutions here. The winners are companies with a product range, a price list, logistics and references in your category, proven by a contract.
• Which segments they serve. Match winners to buyers: one company wins hospitals, another wins schools, a third wins everything.
• How concentrated the market is. A few names winning most lots is a different market from fifty names winning one lot each.
• How contested it is. Lots with one tender received are different from lots with twelve.
• When contracts end. Durations and renewal limits tell you when a buyer and its supplier will talk again.
• Where foreign suppliers already got in. The winner's country and size are recorded, so you can see whether non-domestic companies win directly or not at all.

What a notice does not tell you

Whether the winner is a distributor or a manufacturer. A notice names the company that signed the contract. If it makes the product, it is your competitor; if it resells, it is a potential route to market. The notice itself does not say which, so this has to be checked against what the company actually does.

What was really sold. The CPV code and lot title describe the category, not the brand or model. A "furniture" winner may have supplied another manufacturer's goods, which is exactly the point if you want it to supply yours.

How much money changed hands. Framework values are caps, call-offs under frameworks are often not published individually (Article 50(2) allows them to be grouped or omitted), and some values are withheld or placeholders. Article 50(4) lets buyers withhold information whose release would harm legitimate commercial interests or fair competition.

Who to contact. Notices carry organisational contact points, and some carry the names and e-mail addresses of individuals. The latter are personal data under EU data protection law, and a notice is not a consent to be marketed to. Use the company, not the person.

Everything below the threshold and everything private. A dealer that lives on sales to small businesses and sub-threshold public orders can be invisible on TED and still be the right partner.

Reading it yourself

TED's search and the TED API are free to use for published notices; the search API needs no key. Searching by CPV code, country and notice type (contract award) for the last year gets you the raw list. The work is in the next step: cleaning company names and legal forms, merging the same winner published under slightly different spellings, discarding placeholder values, and then checking each winner's actual business. In Cresques, a market is created from a country plus CPV categories, and the evidence shown for each company is drawn from these award notices in exactly this way.

What this means for a manufacturer

Treat award notices as evidence of existence, not as a sales report. They prove a company sells your category to institutional buyers in that country, which is the hardest thing to know from outside. They do not prove it is a distributor, how big it really is, or that it wants a new supplier. Build the list from the notices, verify each name, and only then decide who gets your supplier pack.