Top 100 winners of government open-tender contracts

Investigating government procurement in Malaysia

In a first-of-its-kind analysis on the public record of Malaysian federal government procurement, it was found that the top 100 companies which received the highest value of open-tender contracts dominated 38% of the total contract value tendered from 2005 to early 2014.

The total value of these contracts is RM32 billion, and the top 100 companies acquired RM12.22 billion or 38 percent of it although they make up merely 2.38% of the total 4,203 companies that received contracts.

Each of the 100 companies received an average of RM122.23 million contract value, significantly higher than the average amount of RM7.21 million received by each of the 4,203 companies. Despite the high average contract value, about half of these big players won only one contract as their contracts were those of high value.



Click to see the difference

Meet the big boys

Together, these companies have received 909 or 10.23% of the total 8,886 open-tender contracts.





Who gave the contracts?

Five ministries contributed to nearly 70% of the total contract value received by the top 100 companies.

Health Ministry 22.29%

Prime Minister's Department 13.94%

Ministry of Rural and Regional Development 12.73%

Works Ministry 11.42%

Defense Ministry 8.71%

This chart connects the giver and receiver of each contract. Each line represents a contract and the thickness represents the value of the contract. The number next to each ministry label is the percentage of total contract value given to the 100 companies. Mouseover to see the contract value. Drag the blocks to rearrange them for better visualization.

The missing RM1.7 billion contracts

A total of 276 contracts or 5.32 percent of the total contracts have no information of the companies that secured them. These 'missing contracts' worth RM1.7 billion in total.

The worst part is the absence of the tender dates of all contracts. We can only guess the tender dates of some contracts based on their tender numbers. From the tender numbers, a small number of contracts were believed to be issued as early as 2005. We believed the published list is not a complete list of open-tender contracts as the total number of contracts – 8,886 - is way too small for a government in a period of nine years.

Notes about data cleaning