A Korean bid announcement is dense with terms that have no clean English equivalent, and the fields that decide whether you are even allowed to bid are rarely the ones at the top. This guide walks through the notice roughly in the order it matters, rather than the order it is printed.
Start with eligibility, not the title
The most common wasted effort in Korean public procurement is reading a specification carefully and only then discovering the tender was restricted to firms in a particular province, or to holders of a licence you do not have. Check these four fields before anything else.
| Korean | Romanised | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| 참가제한지역 | chamga jehan jiyeok | Regional restriction. If a province or city is named, bidders generally must be registered there. '전국' means no regional restriction applies. |
| 업종 | eopjong | Required business or licence category. Construction and specialist works almost always restrict by this. |
| 계약체결방법 | gyeyak chegyeol bangbeop | Contract method. Determines whether the tender is genuinely open, restricted, invitation-only, or already effectively assigned. |
| 입찰참가자격등록마감일시 | ipchal chamga jagyeok deungnok magam ilsi | Deadline to complete supplier registration. Miss it and you cannot bid, regardless of the bid deadline itself. |
The regional restriction is the one that surprises people most. A large share of announcements from municipal governments and local education offices are limited to firms registered in that region, and this is applied strictly.
Who is actually buying
Two different institutions appear on most notices, and conflating them causes confusion:
| Korean | Romanised | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| 공고기관 | gonggo gigwan | The announcing institution — the body running the procurement process. Often the Public Procurement Service acting on someone else's behalf. |
| 수요기관 | suyo gigwan | The demand institution — the body that actually needs the goods or work and will use them. This is your real customer. |
When the two differ, the announcing institution is usually 조달청 (the Public Procurement Service) or one of its regional offices, contracting centrally for a school, hospital, or local authority. Questions about technical requirements normally belong with the demand institution; questions about process belong with the announcing one.
Money: three different numbers
Korean notices distinguish between the budget, the estimated price, and the target price, and they are not interchangeable.
| Korean | Romanised | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| 예산금액 | yesan geumaek | Budget amount. What the institution has allocated, normally inclusive of VAT. |
| 추정가격 | chujeong gagyeok | Estimated price, excluding VAT. This is the figure used to decide which procurement rules and thresholds apply. |
| 예정가격 | yejeong gagyeok | Target price. Often not fixed in advance — for many tenders it is generated at opening from a pool of candidate prices. |
That last one deserves attention, because in a large share of Korean tenders the target price is not a number anyone knows when bidding closes. It is drawn at opening from fifteen candidate figures. We cover the mechanics in how the winning price is decided.
Joint bidding
Korea makes heavy use of consortium bidding, and the notice states whether it is permitted and how the agreement must be filed:
| Korean | Romanised | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| 공동수급 | gongdong sugeup | Joint supply — bidding as a consortium. The notice states whether this is allowed and under what structure. |
| 공동수급협정서 | gongdong sugeup hyeopjeongseo | The consortium agreement. Filed electronically or on paper, with its own deadline that precedes the bid deadline. |
| 공동수급업체지역제한여부 | …jiyeok jehan yeobu | Whether consortium members must also satisfy the regional restriction. If yes, adding a partner from outside the region does not solve an eligibility problem. |
For a foreign firm without a Korean registration, partnering with a registered local company is the usual route in — but note the third row above. A consortium does not override a regional restriction if the notice says members are also bound by it.
The announcement status
Announcements are revised more often than newcomers expect. The notice type tells you what you are looking at:
| Korean | Romanised | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| 등록공고 | deungnok gonggo | Original announcement. |
| 변경공고 | byeongyeong gonggo | Amended announcement. Something material changed — frequently a deadline or a specification. |
| 재공고 | jae gonggo | Re-announcement, usually because the first round failed to produce a valid winner. Often a genuine second chance. |
| 취소공고 | chwiso gonggo | Cancellation. |
This site shows only the latest version of each tender, so if an announcement was amended you are seeing the current state rather than the superseded original.
Documents are where the real requirements live
The title and summary fields are a précis. Binding requirements — technical specifications, evaluation criteria, required certifications, submission formats — sit in the attached files, most often in HWP (Hangul Word Processor) format, sometimes PDF. Any tender you seriously intend to bid on has to be assessed from those attachments, not from a listing page. Every result on this site links to the official announcement where those files are published.