Tribune News Network
Doha
In the recent Qatar Government Procurement Forum, spearheaded by the Ministry of Finance (MoF) and co-sponsored by the Ministry of Commerce and Industry (MoCI) and Qatar Development Bank (QDB), the government provided a preview on more than 2,500 tenders to be procured in 2024. This has come at an ideal time during Qatar’s continued transformation journey.
During the event, it was announced that the largest number of tenders came from the Public Works Authority (Ashghal), the Qatar General Electricity and Water Corporation (Kahramaa) that plan to initiate projects worth QR70 billion, the Ministry of Public Health and Primary Health Care Corporation, Ministry of Education and Higher Education, and the Aspire Zone Foundation, which represented 70% of the state’s total tenders for 2024.
During the event, four key themes emerged: First, while the focus over the past few years has been on the FIFA World Cup 2022 tournament, Qatar will continue to spend significantly on infrastructure, utilities, health, and education, among other sectors, with an additional focus on digitising its services. We also see strong support for national businesses and keenness on Private Public Partnerships, affirming why companies should continue to invest in Qatar.
Second, providing transparency and a high-level forecast of tenders allows companies to plan their resources, capacities, and investments. It can even assist them in balancing their cash flows.
Third, the key sponsors of the forum highlighted that In-Country Value (ICV) and localisation are at the heart of government procurement spend. This will boost local products and services in the different economic sectors and support small and medium enterprises and even the larger ones.
Fourth, MoF, MoCI and QDB shared policies and regulations set by them, and spoke about their keenness to grow and protect the competitiveness of local products and services while maintaining a reasonable degree of free market competition.
Holistically, we can note that 60% of tenders will launch in the year’s first quarter. The key entities with large values and number of tenders may prefer, in the future, to spread them over the calendar year. This approach will enable the public and private sectors to balance their resource requirements and capacities.
Additionally, the sheer number of tenders requires efficient procurement processes with the right mix of government resource capabilities to accommodate the workload. Therefore, building on its efforts to enhance the procurement regulations, the government should continue to focus on streamlining procurement processes to enable the agility needed for such a scale of procurement spend.
To catalyse the economies of scale, the synergies among categories of procurement spend, the potential use of framework agreements, the identification of in-country opportunities, and mapping government-procured products and services to a standard category taxonomy is a must.
The government already has in place the building blocks that include international standards for procurement spend categorisation, company commercial activities, and classification of companies based on their financial and technical capabilities. A central procurement body concentrating on common procurement spend categories will further activate benefits. Such a forum provides the opportunity for businesses to engage directly with government ministries and bodies.
In conclusion, the forum was a great initiative, sending positive themes to the market and supporting localisation and investment attraction in Qatar.
The author is Dr. Bashar El Jawhari - Partner, Logistics and Supply Chain, PwC Middle East