A Dutch experience in Dublin

Some weeks ago we announced you that José Luis Marín, our CEO, was visiting Dublin to participate in the seminar "Smart Construction: Doing bussiness in the Netherlands" organized by Enterprise Ireland, the Government's agency for the development and promotion of Irish business sector.

The seminar has taken place at Enterprise Ireland HQ in Dublin, on Tuesday 23rd February morning. This event is one of the activities organized for the Ireland Construct community, created with the objective to help Irish construction companies achieve strong positions in global market, and in this case it has focused on the Dutch Construction industry. About 35 companies have attended to the seminar and the 1-to-1 meetings that have been organized afterwards with the experts who have spoken previously, in order to help the Irish companies get a better understanding of the available opportunities .

José Luis, our CEO, has shared Euroalert.net knowledge and expertise in the public procurement information services field. He has shown the attendees the possibilities of Euroalert.net in helping individual SMEs across the European Union, to compete with biggest companies, by providing more accurate, and fastest information on tenders in Europe or with market intelligence tools on public procurement opportunities like 10ders Observatory.

In his presentation "Digging business leads out of the internet", Mr. Marín has highlighted that public procurement is an affordable way to export for SMEs. Many companies were very interested in the fact that the levelling factor of the web brings more cost-effective tools to market intelligence on public procurement, like the ones Euroalert provides: the possibility of monitoring the stream of expenditure for their specific products or services or getting rankings for successful bidders in order to look for potential agreements or subcontracting opportunities, can be cheaper through 10ders observatory, than traditional traditional market researches. Here you can check and download the full presentation:
Digging business leads out of the internet
José Luis Marín has shared the panel with several experts of the Dutch construction sector:

• Bas van der Veen, Professor at Innovative Entrepreneurship in Construction at Saxion University, who presented "The future of the Construction Industry in the Netherlands" and provided lots of figures and facts about what is going to happen in Dutch construction market during the next 30 years.
• Pieter van Boom, Managing Director at Bartels consulting engineers,who spoke about "Partnering opportunities – the realities in the Dutch market" and pointed out that "cooperation and collaboration is in Dutch people DNA", which represents a great opportunity for foreign companies with innovative products .
• Peter van de Boogaard, owner of NewCon Vastgoed bv, who shared "The expectations of a Dutch buyer in the Construction industry", and made great description about particularities like the importance of sectors like the student housing in The Netherlands.
• Martin Bourgonje, from Synergy Management, who contributed with "Doing Business in the Netherlands – the small print", contributed with several tips and legal facts about how to establish a company in The Netherlands.
  

It has been a very exciting experience for us, and, as always, another success for all the Euroalert.net community. Thanks to all of you, every day we are getting farther and farther, proving organizations and companies in Europe better and improved innovative services.

10ders Observatory: increase in the number of contracts awarded by EuropeAid in the third quarter of 2009, compared to the drop in tender notices

Over the past few weeks, our colleagues of 10ders Observatory have been providing us with a series of data related to the evolution of public procurement in all Member States of the European Union.

In the last occasion 10ders Observatory data referred to the sharp increase in the value of contracts awarded in the EU in the third quarter of 2009, now they bring us a range of data relating to procurement announcements aimed at the conclusion of contracts in the field of External Cooperation Programmes, published by EuropeAid in the OJEU in the third quarter of 2009.

According to the estimates of 10ders Observatory, the number of notices published by EuropeAid in the third quarter of 2009 decreased slightly compared to the previous quarter (- 1.16%), a decrease which is significantly higher when considering data from the same quarter of 2008 (-14.74%).

However, this downward trend is not recorded in all types of public notices published by EuropeAid in the Official Journal of the European Union. The data about the evolution of contracts and procurement opportunities issued by EuropeAid is quite different depending on the successive stages of the procurement process.

For example, in the case of forecasts, the number of notices published in the OJEU has fallen sharply over the previous quarter (-27.90%), a decline which has been less steep in the case of notices (-16.59%). However, EuropeAid contract awards have increased dramatically in the third quarter of 2009, showing an increase of 107.58% over the same data in the previous quarter.

Comparing these data with the same quarter of 2008, there are decreases in all types of announcements issued by EuropeAid, either in the number of forecasts (-2.33%), the number of tender notices (- 23,63%) or the number of the awarded contracts published in the OJEU, which in this case reflects a decline in terms of the award notices published during the same period of the years 2009 and 2008 (-16.97%).

Considering the proportion of notices published by EuropeAid in the OJEU in relation to each type of document issued during the procurement process, whether they are forecasts, procurement notices, additional information or contract awards, it seems that public procurement notices, which in the third quarter of 2009 accounted for 28%, in the second quarter amounted to 39% of total announcements, while in the case of awards, they accounted nearly 11% of the total in the second quarter compared to 23% in the third quarter of 2009.

Tender notices and additional informations in the third quarter of 2009 represented 30% and 18% respectively, and have minor differences with data from the second quarter, which accounted for 36% in the case of tender notices and for 14% in the case of additional informations.



In addition to these data, it is interesting to study 10ders Observatory estimates regarding the distribution of the announcements published by EuropeAid in the OJEU depending on the type of contract. In this case, it should be noted that in all types of announcements, whether forecasts, tender notices or awards, the ones which record higher contracting figures and publication in the OJEU within the procurement procedures issued by EuropeAid are the announcements related to service contracts, since in the third quarter of 2009 they accounted for more than 50% of the announcements in all cases (55.36%, 65.19% and 63.5% respectively).

This seems to be a trend that can be constantly observed throughout all periods, as announcements for contracting services exceeded 50% in all cases, except in the third quarter of 2008, in which they were a little bit less, accounting for 49.37% of the total. Indeed, in the third quarter of 2008 the distribution was balanced between supply and service contracts, representing 44.3% and 49.37% respectively, while the remaining 6.33% corresponded to works contracts.

It was noted at the beginning of this post that a general decline in the data relating to forecasts was observed during this period. However, the breakdown by type of contract shows the opposite trend in one of the three types of contracts, since there has been an increase in the forecasts announcements for works contracts published by EuropeAid for the third quarter of 2009, both in comparison with the previous quarter, registering an increase of 20%, and with the same quarter of 2008, towards which the announcements simply triple.

Once again we hope the data sets our colleagues of 10ders Observatory have prepared have been useful for you, and we remind you that if you are interested in obtaining specific data for your activities, you can contact them via info@euroalert.net.

This month Euroalert.net will be in Dublin sharing its experience at Enterprise Ireland seminar

One of the things Euroalert.net enjoys the most, is sharing its knowledge and savoir-faire with all the Community, and that's what we are doing again. After some events last year, such as the participation in FICOD 2009, the contribution to the open-data community such as the release of data about the UK public bodies which publish procurement announcements in the OJEU, or new features like the initiative 10ders Observatory, which offers some free insights on public procurement in the EU, Euroalert.net is now travelling to Ireland.

Enterprise Ireland, the Government's agency for the development and promotion of Irish business sector, with whom Euroalert.net is proud to be collaborating, has kindly invited Gateway SCS CEO, José Luis Marín, to be one of the panellists in a seminar organized by EI which is taking place in Dublin on February 23rd 2010. There, we will try to contribute with Euroalert.net expertise in tenders and public procurement contracts as well as project funding opportunities across the European Union.

For over the past months, Enterprise Ireland, has been promoting Ireland Construct, a new initiative which gathers some of the leading Irish construction companies with the objective to help them to achieve strong positions in global markets. For that purpose, Enterprise Ireland is bringing them some useful information and tools to facilitate this target, such as the advice of qualified experts, or specific events like the one we will be participating. Within this framework, this seminar aims to help these companies to acquire better knowledge about the Dutch construction sector.

The companies to which this seminar is addressed are trying to break into the Dutch construction market, and so José Luis Marín will present them Euroalert.net recommendations for "Digging business leads out of the internet", transmitting our know-how in getting the most out of information systems and social networking, and giving some clues that might help to access commercial opportunities in the Dutch construction sector.

We must say that we are really proud of this new opportunity to contribute to the community. After our visit to Ireland you will all have access to the presentation made at Enterprise Ireland HQ in Dublin, here, in Euroalert.net site. Of course, if you want to meet us in Dublin, just drop us an email to info@euroalert.net, and we will try to arrange a meeting there.

10ders Observatory: Strong increase in the total value of contracts awarded in the EU during the third quarter of 2009

According to the estimates of "10ders Observatory, when compared to the same quarter of 2008, the European Union countries (EUR27) ended the third quarter of 2009 with an important growth (+35.81%) in the total value of contracts awarded which are above EU procurement thresholds and must be published in the OJEU.

This data reinforces the trend we announced you a few weeks ago regarding the increase of over 13% in the number of contracts issued and awarded at European level in the 27 European Union countries in relation to the third quarter of 2008.

However, as in the map of the evolution of the awarded contracts that 10ders Observatory released a couple of weeks ago, the differences between countries and types of contracts are also very significant and, therefore, so is the variation of public money allocated through competitive bidding in contracts whose value is above EU procurement thresholds.

For example, the strong growth shown in the chart is largely attributable to the high increase of the total value of service contracts awarded (+58.52%), which has been rising throughout 2009, mostly due to public resources channelled to stimulate economic recovery. The total economic value of contracts awarded for supplies (+20.14%) and public works (+12.44%) has also grown over the third quarter of 2008, but much less.

By countries, the situation is very diverse, showing very high increases, such as the experienced by the UK (+77.03%) in all types of contracts, by Belgium (+135.09%) mainly in public works, or by the Netherlands (+85.76%) and Sweden (+93.89%) with an important increase in service contracts awarded.

EUR16 growth has been much lower (+9.96%) than the increase within EUR27 (+35.81%), since neither Sweden nor the UK add their strong growth figures to this group, but also because of the large drop in the economic value of public contracts awarded in countries like Spain (-30.15%), Ireland (-33.06%) and Italy (-14.73%).

When transferring all these data to a map, the increases of public money awarded in contracts whose value is above community thresholds and were published in the OJEU in the third quarter of 2009 compared to the same period in 2008, show an interesting insight into the evolution of public spending directly injected into contracts awarded through competitive bidding with companies, from which you can surely draw interesting conclusions:



As in previous occasions, we hope this article that our colleagues at "10ders Observatory" have prepared for Euroalert.net blog, will give you some valuable information. If you need any more detailed data sets for your own analysis, you can contact them at info@euroalert.net.

PS: Very soon, we will be publishing our estimate compared with the evolution of European Union GDP by 2009.