Research · Updated: October 6, 2026 · 8 min read

Tenders in Uzbekistan: how many rivals and who wins, in 162,462 deals

Most tenders in Uzbekistan come down to just two companies, and in those contests the price barely moves: in 2026 it fell by only 2.7%. Once there are six or more bidders, the winner gives up a third of the starting price. We downloaded the entire public register of completed deals on etender.uzex.uz, 162,000 contracts since 2022, and worked out how many rivals you can expect, who takes the money and whether a newcomer stands a chance.

Tanlo analysis of the "Amalga oshgan bitimlar" (completed deals) register on etender.uzex.uz, downloaded on 6 October 2026. Methodology is at the end of the article.

What kind of procurement these figures cover

etender.uzex.uz hosts two competitive procedures: best-offer selection (otbor in Russian, eng yaxshi takliflarni tanlash in Uzbek) and the tender. In both, price is not the only factor: the customer also scores experience, delivery times and quality. Selection is used for contracts up to UZS 11 bn (up to UZS 2.64 bn for budget customers, i.e. state-funded organisations), and a tender for anything larger. The law sets these thresholds in BRV, the base calculation amount, currently UZS 440,000: 25,000 and 6,000 BRV respectively.

From here on, "contests" means selections and tenders together. Small purchases of goods usually go through the e-shop (an online catalogue of supplier offers) and the auction (a reverse auction where price alone decides) on xarid.uzex.uz, and they are not included in these figures (for the differences, see our article "Auction, competition, selection and e-shop").

The scale of the register: UZS 81.4 trillion, 7,193 customers and about 24,000 winning companies. The typical deal is worth UZS 80.8 m. Budget-funded organisations signed 77% of the contracts, but more than half of the money (55.6%) came from corporate customers, meaning companies in which the state holds 50% or more.

How many rivals you will face

Not many. In 56.8% of deals there were exactly two bidders, and in another 22.3% there were three. Roughly one lot in ten attracts five or more bids.

An important caveat: two bidders is the minimum at which the law treats a selection or tender as valid. If only one bid comes in, the contest fails and never reaches the deals register. So real competition is even weaker than these figures suggest.

Share of deals: 2022–2026. Reduction: how far the final contract price is below the starting price; the median means half of the deals saw a smaller reduction and half a larger one.

The more bidders, the further the price falls. But this is a correlation, not proof of cause: large lots and lots with an inflated starting price also draw more bidders. And a two-bidder contest with almost no reduction can be perfectly honest or can involve a "token" second bidder; the register cannot tell them apart.

Discounts are growing at every level of competition. The median reduction across all deals was about 2% in 2022 and 5.7% in 2026. With six or more bidders, the price fell by 16% across all years and by 35% in 2026. Suppliers used to winning at close to the starting price should rerun their numbers.

Does a newcomer stand a chance?

Yes. In 2026, 3,560 companies won at least one contest. Of these, 1,207, one in three, won on etender for the first time since 2022. Newcomers accounted for 21.4% of the year's deals.

And it is not just small change. The share of deals won by newcomers is almost the same for lots of every size, between 20% and 28%. On lots above UZS 5 bn it is actually the highest. If you have never taken part before, start with our step-by-step guide.

Who takes the money

The market is highly unequal. 239 companies, the 1% of winners with the largest contracts, received 36.6% of all the money. The top 10% took three quarters (75.1%). The bottom half of winners shares less than 3%.

At the same time, 36% of winners have won exactly once, and half have no more than two wins. Big companies divide up the expensive lots, while the bulk of deals are worth tens to hundreds of millions of soums, where small firms compete.

"Every customer has its own supplier." It happens, but it is not the rule. Of the 1,565 customers with 20 or more deals in the register, only 127 (8.1%) awarded half or more of their contracts to a single supplier, and only 21 awarded more than 80%. This is a lower-bound estimate: share by value, small customers and related firms registered under different tax IDs (INN) were not taken into account.

When to look for contests: November and December

In 2022–2025, November and December accounted for 23.3% of all deals, while January accounted for just 2.8%. For budget customers the swing is sharper: 24.7% and 2%.

The likely reason is the budget calendar. The fiscal year matches the calendar year, budget organisations may spend their appropriations only until it ends, and January is merely an additional period for settling payments. Corporate customers have a gentler peak (18.2% in November–December, 5.6% in January) because the Budget Code does not apply to them.

The takeaway: have your electronic signature (EDS), documents and money for the deposit (zakalat, the bid security) ready by the end of October, not in the middle of the season.

In 2025, almost one contract in six fell through

Winning is not the same as getting paid. In 2025, 17.7% of deals ended with the contract being terminated or one of the parties refusing it, up from 9.7% in 2022. Suppliers walk away from contracts they have won in a steady 3–4% of cases. The growth comes mainly from refusals by customers themselves: from 0.2% in 2022 to 7.3% in 2025. The register does not say why, and we did not investigate the reasons.

Walking away from a win is costly for a supplier. The deposit is not returned. The right to sign the contract passes to the reserve winner (the runner-up named in advance), if one has been designated, at the winner's price. And the company that backed out is entered in the Unified Register of Unscrupulous Contractors, the state blacklist that bars it from public procurement for two years. Inclusion in the register can be challenged in court.

Fewer contests on etender, but larger ones

Over four years the number of deals in the first nine months fell 3.4-fold, yet the money held steady at around UZS 12 trillion. The typical contract grew by half.

There is no official explanation. Possible reasons, which are our own hypothesis: since 1 March 2025 there has been a simplified low-value purchase that requires no public announcement, and from the same year other platform operators have also been allowed to run procurements. Since 2026, a selection with a single bidder counts as valid if the same company is still the only one left after a repeat contest, which probably explains why the share of such deals rose to 3.6% (previously a fraction of a percent).

What to do now

1. Look for niches that have historically drawn few bidders. You cannot know the number of rivals before the bidding closes, but you can estimate it from the customer's and category's past deals.
2. Work out your floor price in advance. Cost, deposit, taxes and minimum margin. In 2026 the price fell by 18% with four bidders and by 35% with six or more. If your floor is higher, the lot is probably not for you.
3. Don't dump prices just to win. Bidding at an artificially low price and then refusing the contract is expressly prohibited by law and lands you in the register of unscrupulous contractors.
4. Get ready for the season by the end of October. The peak is November and December. How much money you need for the EDS, deposit and platform commission is covered in "How much it costs to bid in public procurement".
5. Check who wins with your customer. On a tender's page in the Tanlo catalogue you can see which supplier most often wins with that customer and what share it holds. If there is a "regular" winner, your effort may be better spent on another lot.

Methodology

On 6 October 2026 we downloaded the public register of completed deals on etender.uzex.uz: 162,462 deals from January 2022 to 5 October 2026. Values, shares and medians are based on 158,727 deals in soums; deals in US dollars, euros and roubles were excluded. Winner statistics exclude 2,900 deals in which the winner's tax ID is hidden (mostly sole proprietors). The number of bidders is taken from the register as is. The unit of count is the deal (a single contest with several lots can produce several deals). The 2026 failure rate is still incomplete: recent contracts have not yet had time to fall through.

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