Building Europe, a Region Profile: Construction in Europe 2016 to mid 2019

For all its recent troubles, Europe is seeing growth in one sector: construction in the public sector. In this article, we explore the trends in the European public works sector.

An overview of Europe’s public sector construction market

As we can see from the chart for the period from the beginning of 2016 to present the amount of tenders published by European countries in ‘construction’ have steadily risen. This means that there are plenty of opportunities to bid for. 

The graph shows the number of tenders published in Europe relating to ‘construction’ over the past three years. We see that seasonal fluctuations: with buying activity generally picking up as the year progresses before dropping for the winter seasons. 2019 has seen the biggest leap. Crucially, back in 2016, there were fewer tenders but higher average values which had a knock on effect on market size in 2017. Come 2018/19 the numbers of tenders more than make up for the lower average value as we shall see below:

Sizing the market

Given that two quarters of 2019 is over half of 2018, it is reasonable to expect that the public sector construction sector in 2019 will significantly surpass 2018 in terms of value. 

By looking at the top countries, we can get an idea of who is driving this growth. The vast majority (87%) of the 41,174 tenders issued in this period come from the 10 countries below. If we combine the tender numbers with the median value of tenders we get the following picture:

To conclude, the European construction market is both a large market and one growing in value. This is because tender numbers are making up for the lower average value in 2018 compared to three years ago. Although the three major economies in Western Europe lead, other countries are also seeing high demand and high value. You can find live construction opportunities for Europe and the world on https://openopps.com/.