Viran's coverage now extends across Asia: South Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines and Kazakhstan, together with the prefectural and municipal layer of Japanese procurement that sits beneath the national one.
Several of these markets are more open to foreign suppliers than their reputation suggests. South Korea and Japan are both parties to the WTO Government Procurement Agreement, which commits them to treating suppliers from other signatories, including the EU, on equal terms for contracts above the agreed thresholds. That is a legal entitlement, not a courtesy, and it is routinely left unused.
Japan is worth separating out. We added national coverage earlier this year, and the layer beneath it turns out to matter just as much: prefectures and major cities run substantial procurement of their own, with their own publication practices. A supplier watching only the national layer sees a fraction of Japanese public spending.
The common obstacle across the region is neither eligibility nor procedure. It is that notices are published in the national language, on national timetables, in formats built for domestic suppliers who already know where to look. That is an engineering problem, and it is the one we have spent our effort on.
Contracts across all of these markets now arrive in the same pipeline as domestic and EU tenders, matched against the same capability profile.
