In 2021, total global military expenditure passed USD 2 trillion for the first time. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), world military spending increased by 0.7 per cent in real terms in 2021, to reach USD 2.1 trillion. This was the seventh consecutive year that spending increased.
TenderAlpha has long been aware of the growing significance of military spending. After months of tireless efforts, we are pleased to announce that we have launched our latest product - the TenderAlpha Global Defense and Military Contracting News Feed.
The feed contains news articles about defense and military government contract awards in the US, the EU, the UK, and Russia for products and services procured by the defense departments and ministries in these countries and regions for which media reports are available.
Its geographical coverage includes three of the top 5 heaviest military spenders in 2021 - the US (USD 801bn, ranked 1st), the UK (USD 68.4bn, ranked 4th), and Russia (USD 65.9bn, ranked 5th). At the same time, all the EU nations combined spent a total of USD 342bn, meaning that, as a whole, the bloc goes 2nd ahead of China and its estimated spending of USD 293bn.
These figures show that TenderAlpha’s Defense and Military Contracting News Feed includes contracts news data about the countries and regions that have the highest military expenditure - valuable information from which important insights can be drawn about the spending trends in these geographies, with defense investment serving as a predictive geopolitical risk assessment proxy.
How Is the Data Sourced?
Over the years, TenderAlpha has built unmatched expertise in collecting, aggregating, and standardizing data from official public procurement sources. We continue to source and use such data for the new Defense and Military Contracting News Feed. To complement the data coming directly from public authorities, we also extract information from defense departments or ministries publications.
The novelty in the company’s data sourcing process is the use of media outlets as a primary source for the construction of the feed. For example, we crawl hundreds of specialized defense media outlets such as Defense Industry Daily and Breaking Defense, as well as more generic major global media publications, including The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, YahooFinance, Govconwire, and others.
Data Scope and Geographical Coverage
The Defense and Military Contracting News Feed contains more than 150,000 news stories since 2016. In addition, the daily and intra-daily ongoing delivery provided by TenderAlpha means that some 100 new contract award stories are added to the feed every day.
Just like the TenderAlpha Unified Global Government Contracts Feed, the Defense and Military Contracting News Feed also provides information about the contract awardees.
At the time of writing, the feed contains over 3000 ticker-mapped publicly-traded companies and some 100,000 private companies mapped to ID, as well as relevant information about them, such as:
- BizPortal ID
- Name
- National ID
- Location
- Point of contact
- Listing status information
As mentioned above, in terms of geographical coverage, the Defense and Military Contracting News Feed includes news data from the EEA-30, the US, the UK, and Russia.
By no means is this the final version of the product, though. The TenderAlpha team continues to work on including new geographies in order to increase the records in the feed.
Use Cases
Information about defense spending has always been of great importance, but after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it has grown incomparably more valuable. This has been testified by the early interest received by the new feed from potential customers.
There are several applications that these customers are looking to make the most of
First of all, the Defense and Military Contracting News Feed has a competitive advantage in terms of the high frequency of its updates. New contracts are added daily and even intra-daily, which allows for a dynamic, almost real-time monitoring and analysis of public spending in the defense sector.
Following our discovery of early evidence that government contract awards might have a positive impact on the awardee’s stock price, we can highlight the feed’s application for institutional investors in this department.
The product offers a platform for analysis of the most successful government suppliers in the defense and military field, with the information potentially serving as a predictor of future significant stock returns.
Then, by specializing in defense and military contracting news in particular, TenderAlpha’s new feed can also be viewed as a framework offering important information that can be used as a proxy to assess geopolitical risk.
The overview of different countries’ spending and what equipment they invest in, enables users to track the intentions of these nations to a degree and detect patterns in their spending, which could be indicative of their defense and military strategies.
How Does the Feed Work with the Other TenderAlpha Feeds?
The Global Defense and Military Contracting News Feed is TenderAlpha’s first data product that specializes in one particular industry.
It represents an extension of our data sourcing capabilities, as we crawl and process information from media sources, instead of public procurement portals as is the case with our Unified Global Government Contracts Data Feed and the Global Green Public Procurement Contracts Data Feed.
However, the new Defense and Military Contracting News Feed complements our existing feeds, especially with regards to the provision of more timely information.
It is not uncommon for a large government contract to appear in the media before a contract award notice is published on the relevant government or public procurement portal.
This means that those users who have access to a comprehensive data product like TenderAlpha’s Defense and Military Contracting News Feed can get early information about the awarding of a significant tender, which, in turn, will enable them to perform a high-frequency public spending monitoring and equity analysis.
The news feed covers predominantly larger contracts, which tend to grab media attention, while the Unified feed contains all (even the smallest) tenders that have been published in official government procurement portals since 2010 and on an ongoing basis. Please note, though, that the latter is true only about the geographies covered by the Unified feed - over 45 countries, including the EEA-30, the UK, federal-level US, Canada, and Australia; as well as Russia, Ukraine, Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, South Korea, and others.
The combination of the Defense and Military Contracting News Feed and the Unified Global Government Contracts Data Feed will ensure that no defense-related contract is missed by the user.
Want to trial our new Defense and Military Contracting News Feed for free? Get in touch now!