Every Korean public tender states a contract method (계약체결방법). It is a short phrase, easy to skim past, and it tells you more about your realistic chances than almost anything else in the notice. Four appear regularly.
| Korean | Romanised | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| 일반경쟁 | ilban gyeongjaeng | Open competition. Any qualified supplier may bid. The most genuinely open category. |
| 제한경쟁 | jehan gyeongjaeng | Limited competition. Open, but only to bidders meeting stated restrictions — region, licence, past performance, or product type. |
| 지명경쟁 | jimyeong gyeongjaeng | Designated competition. Only specifically nominated suppliers are invited to compete. |
| 수의계약 | sui gyeyak | Private contract. Negotiated directly with a chosen supplier rather than won through competition. |
일반경쟁 — open competition
The default under Korean public contracting law. The requirement is advertised widely and any supplier holding the general qualifications may submit a bid. If you are new to the Korean market and looking for a realistic entry point, this is the category to filter for.
Open competition does not mean no requirements at all. You still need to be registered as a competitive bidding participant in the national system, and product tenders may still require a matching product registration. It means there is no additional restriction narrowing the field beyond those baseline qualifications.
제한경쟁 — limited competition
The most common method you will encounter in practice, and the one that needs the closest reading. It exists to balance the breadth of open competition against the risk of unqualified suppliers, by adding restrictions such as:
- Regional restriction — bidders must be registered in a named province or city. Extremely common for municipal and school tenders.
- Licence restriction — bidders must hold a specified business licence category.
- Performance restriction — bidders must show comparable completed work, often within a set period and above a set value.
- Product restriction — for goods, bidders must be registered against a specific product classification, and sometimes as the manufacturer rather than a reseller.
The word 제한경쟁 alone does not tell you which restriction applies. You have to read the relevant fields in the notice and, for anything serious, the attached specification. A tender that is wide open to a Seoul-registered software firm may be entirely closed to an identical firm registered in Busan.
지명경쟁 — designated competition
The contracting body nominates a set of suppliers it considers suitable and competition runs among them only. It is used where the work is specialised enough that open advertising is impractical. If you are not already on the buyer's radar, an announcement under this method is generally not an opportunity you can act on — though it is still useful market intelligence about who is buying what.
수의계약 — private contract
A contract awarded without competitive bidding. Korean rules permit this in defined circumstances: contracts below a value threshold, urgent requirements, cases where only one supplier can realistically perform the work, and situations where a competitive process has already failed to produce a winner.
You will see a steady stream of these in the listings, frequently with titles containing 수의계약 안내 공고 — a notice announcing the intent to contract privately, sometimes inviting quotations from interested parties. Read these carefully rather than dismissing them. Some are effectively already decided; others are genuine small-value opportunities where a quotation is being sought quickly.
What this means for filtering
A reasonable way to triage a list of announcements, if you are trying to find work rather than track a market:
- 일반경쟁 — worth reading in full.
- 제한경쟁 — worth reading, but check the restrictions before investing time in the specification.
- 지명경쟁 — treat as market intelligence unless you were nominated.
- 수의계약 — check whether a quotation is genuinely being invited, and note the short deadlines.
The contract method appears on every result on this site under "Method", so you can triage directly from the listing. For the related question of how the winning bid is then selected, see how the winning price is decided.