In 2007 the value of public procurement contracts exceeded PLN103.1 billion. Public Procurement Bulletin published over 195,000 notices, of which 51% were invitations to tender for construction works, 23% were invitations to tender for product supplies and 26% for services. On average, 2.29 tenders were submitted per invitation. Tendering notices of the highest value – 11,197 in total - were also published in the Official Journal of the European Union. They accounted for 8% of all contract and design contest notices published in the journal.
This shows that the Polish public procurement market has already gained international significance. And what is important, the market will continue to expand in the years to come because Poland has a growing amount of European Union funds to spend in the coming years and plans to carry out large infrastructure projects, as well as projects associated with the Euro 2012 European Football Championship, environmental protection and regional development. This expansion is reflected in the fact that the number of notices is already three times higher than it was in the corresponding period last year.
This is good news for companies and foreign investors. Although last year 98% of all public procurement contracts on the Polish market were awarded to domestic businesses, with only 309 contracts awarded to foreign companies, most of them based in Britain, Germany and Italy, we want to send an increasingly strong signal to foreign operators that there is a lot of activity on this market now and that Poland is changing and becoming more and more open to cooperation.
This cooperation produces benefits to both sides. The participation of Chinese consortiums in tendering processes for the construction of the Legia stadium in Warsaw made Polish investors and contractors realise that the huge potential that had developed in China in the run-up to the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing should be - and will be - utilised on the globalised market for investment projects after 2008, which means the Chinese may enter the Polish market as well. The Public Procurement Office appreciates the participation of foreign companies in tendering processes and sees these companies as an important factor enhancing competition on the Polish market and consequently leading to lower prices and higher quality. The Polish public procurement market is open to foreign companies. Until 2004 Polish public procurement law included provisions which offered some preferential treatment to domestic businesses. But since Poland’s EU entry, the market has been fully open to foreign competition and foreign companies enjoy the same rights as Polish ones.
Also, legislative changes pursued by the Public Procurement Office contribute to enhancing the openness of the Polish market to foreign companies. The objective is to rationalise the procurement system to make sure that awarding entities initiating open tendering procedures end up with the best contracts. At present, formal barriers – both those put by the awarding entities and those posed by law – mean that in some cases the awarding entity is forced to pick up tenders which are not the best. For example, existing regulations require that tenders which fail to meet all formal requirements should be rejected. We are now trying to change these regulations to make them more reasonable. Of course, some formal requirements have to be met but should be brought to a minimum. They should not obscure the essence of the tendering notice or the tender. How are we trying to rationalise the system? Firstly, we are working to limit the need for awarding entities to cancel tendering procedures. We enable these entities to correct mistakes and tendering notices, and to extend deadlines, while tenderers are allowed to adjust their tenders to these changes. To reduce the risk of cancellation of tendering processes, we allow awarding entities to correct mistakes – some of them quite obvious and minor - made by tenderers in order to prevent the rejection of tenders for trivial reasons.
We also want to diminish the language barrier. We are aware that, even though foreign companies receive equal treatment in Poland in terms of legal and formal requirements, domestic companies have a significant advantage since they know the local language, local market and local ways to complete bureaucratic procedures. This is a natural thing. There are several ways to reduce this advantage. The direct way is to require that the tendering notices of the highest value be translated into foreign languages and placed in European Union bulletins. And this is being done. The indirect way is to encourage public awarding entities not to limit themselves to publishing in foreign languages only those tendering notices that are required by law. If the awarding entity has some knowledge about the market and the ability to attract good foreign tenders it should publish invitations to tender in foreign languages also for contract of lower value. Another indirect measure involves efforts to streamline the system and make it more comprehensible to both Polish and foreign companies. Additionally, if we supplement these measures with an appropriate system for promoting the Polish public procurement market and a system of updated information about procedures and sources of information for entrepreneurs available to Polish institutions abroad and foreign institutions in Poland we will be able to say with full conviction that the market is fully open.