Viran's coverage now spans the Baltic states and Central and South-Eastern Europe: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Czechia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Hungary, Croatia, Romania, Bulgaria and Greece.
These are all EU member states, which makes this the least exotic expansion we have made and, for that reason, one of the most immediately useful. The thresholds are the ones a European supplier already works with. The procedures are the ones it already knows. Above the EU thresholds, a contract in Riga is governed by the same directives as a contract in Rotterdam.
The barrier has been language, and language alone. A contract notice published in Latvian or Bulgarian is entirely open to a Finnish or German bidder and entirely invisible to one, and those two facts have coexisted comfortably for years.
Volumes here also do not track the size of the domestic economy. EU structural and cohesion funding drives infrastructure, digitalisation and energy programmes considerably larger than national budgets alone would support, which means the contracts on offer are frequently bigger than the market's headline figures would lead a supplier to expect.
Fewer cross-border bidders reach these competitions than reach the western European ones. That is a discovery problem rather than a competitive one, and it is the kind of problem that coverage solves outright.
Contracts across all eleven markets now arrive in the same pipeline as domestic tenders.
