A tarsiyah is the decision awarding a competition to a supplier. Once announced, the competition stops being an opportunity and becomes public record — and for the first time in the cycle you can see what buyers actually pay rather than what you assume they pay.
It is the most wasted data source in the Saudi market. Most firms read one award notice — for the competition they just lost — and forget it. The value is not in a single notice; it is in reading many together.
What an award notice carries
- The buying entity and the competition reference.
- The awarded value in riyals.
- The winning party — where it is named.
- The award date and the tender period.
And what it does not
This matters more, because ignoring it is the source of most wrong conclusions:
- No detailed scope. Two contracts at the same value can differ completely in duration and quantity.
- No bidder count. A low value may mean a crowded market — or one competition with no competitor.
- No score breakdown. You cannot tell whether the winner won on technical merit or on price.
- Not always a named winner. A material share of captured records carry no name.
How to use it in pricing
The correct use is narrow and genuinely useful: as a sanity check on your own build-up. Price from cost, margin and risk as usual, then compare against the range this buyer has previously accepted in this sector. If you are far outside it, you have either misread the scope or you are competing for something else — both worth pausing on before you submit.
The wrong use is the reverse: deriving your price from an average of awards. An average pools contracts of different scope and duration, so building on it means pricing against something that was never bought.
From notice to pattern
One notice is news. A hundred is a map: which buyers purchase what you sell, at what typical size, and where spending concentrates. That is what turns awards from post-loss curiosity into an input to the bid/no-bid decision before you buy the booklet.
The aggregate picture of the Saudi market — total awarded value, sector composition and contract-size bands — is published on the government tender market page, with the basis of every figure stated beside it.
