In Bulgaria you are not losing the tenders. You never see them.
ACSO Consulting is a Bulgarian company based in Sofia. It represents foreign manufacturers of machines and industrial equipment on this market: the same role a territory agent plays at home, with Bulgaria as the territory.
Where is your company registered?
In Italy and in Austria there are existing public funding lines that cover part of the cost of an engagement like this one, and they work differently from each other. That is why there is a separate page for each country, in that country’s language.
The fee can be funded under the SIMEST Temporary Manager line, which requires a third party service company and expressly allows that company to be foreign.
Rappresentanza commerciale in Bulgaria →Guideline IO-8 lists consultants resident in the target country as eligible providers, at 50 per cent of net cost. The eligibility check is made by the AussenwirtschaftsCenter, not by us.
Markteintritt Bulgarien →There is no federal instrument that can pay for this, and we say so rather than imply otherwise. What the German page gives you instead is a straight comparison against what the alternatives in Sofia actually cost.
Markteintritt Bulgarien →Registered somewhere else? Nothing below depends on your country. Read on, and use the form at the bottom.
Fourteen awards out of 545. Two of them were a real sale.
The EU tender archive for Bulgarian public contracts, January 2024 to 22 September 2026: 44,493 award notices, of which 740 for industrial machinery. Of those, 545 state the supplier’s country, and fourteen went to a foreign supplier.
All fourteen were opened and read one by one.
- Five are Rosatom spare parts for the Kozloduy nuclear plant, where an open tender does not exist in any meaningful sense.
- Six are spares and service on plant that was already installed: a Pekrun gearbox, ZVVZ fans, Toshiba turbines, a Končar system, a Giesecke+Devrient software update for the Bulgarian National Bank, spares for Sulzer pumps.
- One is not a Bulgarian award at all: valves delivered to Komotini in Greece for the IGB pipeline. Bulgarian buyer, Greek site.
- Two are genuinely a foreign manufacturer selling a new machine: a 101,702 EUR precision rotary module to the Technical University of Sofia, won by the Polish entity of GF Machining Solutions under a Bulgarian recovery-plan project, and three scrap grabs worth 211,764 EUR to the Port of Varna, won by a Latvian company.
In almost three years, two foreign manufacturers sold a new machine to a Bulgarian public buyer, for 101,702 and 211,764 EUR. Everything else was spare parts on equipment somebody else had already installed, or Kozloduy. That is not a market that rejects foreign machines. It is a market in which foreign machines arrive through somebody who is registered here.
And before you check it yourself: 97.4 per cent of Bulgarian machinery awards go to a Bulgarian operator. Most member states sit high on that measure, so the number on its own proves nothing. What matters is what the other 2.6 per cent turned out to be once every one of those fourteen notices was opened and read.
notice-type IN (can-standard) AND buyer-country IN (BGR) AND classification-cpv IN (42*)
AND publication-date>=20240101 AND publication-date<=20260922. Extracted 26.09.2026.
Denominator: only the 545 of 740 notices that state a supplier country; the other 195 do not report it
and were excluded, not ignored. Totals grow with every new publication: if you find a few more, that means
you have the right query.
On request we send you the extract for your own CPV codes, free and with no obligation.
What the work actually is
Not a market report. The commercial work you would do yourself if you had an office in Sofia.
Territory representation
A written mandate with a defined territory, an agreed commission and verifiable targets. Exclusive on request.
Any mandates already in place, with their products and territories, are disclosed before signature, so you can check for yourself that there is no overlap with your own line.
Public tenders
Monitoring of the notices relevant to your technology and an assessment of whether bidding is worth it. Then the form is chosen: ACSO as lead of a consortium in which you supply the economic and technical capacity under Art. 63 of Directive 2014/24/EU, or ACSO as a reseller buying and invoicing in its own name.
What is not promised is bidding alone. A consulting company has neither the turnover nor the comparable supply record a Bulgarian notice demands. Anyone telling you otherwise has not read one.
Private industrial customers
Steel fabricators, water and energy utilities, food processing, logistics. Visits, technical presentation, negotiation, follow-up. In Bulgarian with them, in your language with you.
Here the barrier is not legal. A Bulgarian fabricator can wire money abroad tomorrow. The barrier is more ordinary: who answers when the machine stops on a Thursday afternoon, how fast the spare part arrives, and who talks to a maintenance manager who does not speak English.
Installation, service, spare parts
Coordination of commissioning and after-sales on the ground. This is the part that decides the second sale, and the margin that repeats every year.
ACSO has no workshop of its own and no technicians on the payroll, and does not intend to suggest otherwise. For commissioning and calibration it works with an application engineer; for on-site intervention it identifies and coordinates the local supplier and answers for the result. If you would rather keep service in-house that is fine, but somebody has to pick up the phone in Bulgarian.
You have never heard of us. Here is how to check before you commit.
A company you do not know is proposing a 15,000 EUR engagement. Wanting proof is the correct reaction, and none of it requires taking anything on trust: everything below arrives before you sign or pay.
- On the first e-mail: full company name, registration number, registered office and the name of the managing director, with a direct link to the entry in the Bulgarian Commercial Register. It is public, free, and available in English.
- Real work before you pay: the TED extract of Bulgarian tenders under your own CPV codes for the last 24 months, free. You see how the work is done on data that concerns you, not on a slide deck.
- Contract before payment: scope, timing and expected results in writing. Not after the first payment. Before.
- Paid monthly in advance: 2,500 EUR before the month it covers begins. You can stop at the end of any month, so you are never committed to more than the month you have paid for, and never to all six.
- Verifiable against a public source in your own country: that ACSO qualifies as the service company under the Italian SIMEST line, and as a target-country consultant under the Austrian IO-8 guideline, is not our claim. It is in the published texts, so read them rather than us: SIMEST Circular 8/394/2023 (definitions, “Società di servizi”) and Richtlinie IO-8 (point 5, eligible costs).
- First call in your language, with nobody in the middle. Working languages: German, Italian, English, Serbian, Bulgarian.
Do not take any of it on trust. Ask, and the first reply carries our registration number and a register extract, so you can check the company yourself in the Bulgarian Commercial Register, English section. Search by the number rather than the name: the number returns exactly one company.
Mandates that are not accepted
- From anyone who already has an active distributor or agent in Bulgaria. This is checked on the first call and if confirmed the conversation ends there.
- From anyone looking for a Bulgarian company as a tax address. That is not the business.
- Defence and armaments industry, in any form.
How it starts: a closed engagement, not a mandate
Nobody is asked to sign a representation agreement at the first meeting. It starts with a bounded, fixed-fee engagement with an end date, which leaves you holding a result even if you then stop. Two sizes, depending on what you want to risk.
Six-month market entry engagement · Bulgaria
- Months 1-2. Mapping of Bulgarian users of your technology with company name, contact person and telephone number; installed base, meaning who already runs machines of your brand, which models and in what condition; who sells against you in Bulgaria today; the full TED extract for your CPV codes over the last 24 months
- Months 3-4. Direct contact with the technical and purchasing people identified, in Bulgarian, with name, role and outcome recorded; data sheet and price list adapted to the local market; ACSO as your Bulgarian point of contact on your material
- Months 5-6. Live negotiations opened and followed through to a quotation; relevant tenders identified and assessed one by one; a final report with a plain recommendation: enter, wait, or drop it
- All six months. A Bulgarian number answered by somebody who speaks your customer’s language and understands what machine you sell
The six months are not arbitrary. They are the minimum duration that makes the engagement eligible under the Italian and Austrian funding lines. See your country page above.
First, if you prefer: the preliminary check
1,500 EUR, two weeks. Only the user mapping, the installed base and the TED extract on your codes. It exists so you can decide with data in hand rather than with a presentation. If you then award the six-month engagement, the 1,500 EUR is credited in full against the fee. Deliberately small, and deliberately outside the funding lines, which have a floor of 10,000 EUR and six months.
Payment
2,500 EUR per month, payable in advance of the month it covers. You can stop at the end of any month, so your commitment never runs beyond the month you have paid for rather than the whole engagement. It is a fee against activities defined in the contract. It is not a fixed sum set against future commission, it creates no right to repayment or to an indemnity, and it is not a guaranteed minimum under an agency contract.
Paying in advance cuts both ways, and the contract says so in both directions. A month that is not paid is not worked, after written notice and five working days. A month that is paid and not worked is refunded. And the rights in everything produced pass to you as soon as that month’s payment has cleared, so a month you have paid for is yours outright, with nothing held back. The wording is in the terms, clause 4a.
At the end you are not tied in
After six months there is no obligation to award a mandate. The file is yours and you can take it to any other representative, or use it to open your own structure.
If it does continue
A representation mandate on commission, within the market range for capital equipment, higher on spare parts and tapering on large orders. Bulgarian law, Commercial Code art. 32-48, implementing Directive 86/653/EEC, which you already know from your own transposition, and the courts of Sofia. Agency law is harmonised across the Union by that directive, so the choice of Bulgarian law moves the forum, not the substance.
Two things your accountant will ask
The market entry engagement is a service contract, not an agency contract, so no ENASARCO question arises on it at all. On a later representation mandate the question does arise, and the answer depends on the facts: ENASARCO registration follows an agent established and operating outside Italy only where the activity is genuinely carried out abroad. Your accountant should form his own view on that, and we will give him whatever he needs. Separately, the end-of-contract indemnity under Directive 86/653 only accrues under an agency mandate. A fixed-fee engagement does not create it.
Who pays for it, by country
The honest version, including the country where the answer is nobody.
Italy
SIMEST, Fondo 394/81, Temporary Manager line, Circular 8/394/2023 in the version of 15.09.2026. It requires the contract to be made with a third party service company and defines that company as a limited company including one under foreign law. Minimum 10,000 EUR, minimum six months, at least 60 per cent of the intervention in the manager’s fees.
It is mainly a subsidised loan the Italian company repays. A grant share of up to 10 per cent is available on any one of ten listed grounds, several of which have nothing to do with geography: an ISO 45001, 14001 or SA8000 type certification, at least 20 per cent export turnover, youth or female ownership, innovative SME status. SIMEST decides the application. ACSO is eligible and signs the declaration you attach. It does not file for you.
Italian page →Austria
go-international, Internationalisierungsscheck, guideline IO-8. Point 5 lists consultants resident in the target country among the eligible providers for the consultancy cost category. 50 per cent of net cost, the consultancy line capped at 4,000 EUR and the whole application at 5,000 EUR for a European target market.
Eligibility of the provider is checked by the AussenwirtschaftsCenter in Sofia, not asserted here. The applicant must be an Austrian company and a WKO member.
Austrian page →Germany
Nothing at federal level can pay for this. The BAFA consultancy scheme caps the grant far below the cost and closes to new applications at the end of 2026, and the federal market development programme pays an appointed organiser rather than your own consultant.
So the German page does not make a funding argument. It makes a price argument instead, against what a presence in Sofia costs through the existing channels.
German page →Thirty minutes, in your language.
Tell us what you build and who your typical customers are at home. The first call can be in German, Italian or English.
On that first call you get two answers, free and with no obligation: whether installations of your technology already exist in Bulgaria, and whether the territory is already covered by somebody.
A reply within one working day. Not “as soon as possible”: within one working day. It is the first thing promised here and the first thing you can check, so it may as well be accurate.
Message received.
You will be contacted within one working day to arrange the call.
Bulgaria does not open from head office.
It opens through a counterparty registered on the ground. Six months, a fixed fee, and at the end you decide whether to go on.
Talk to us: 30 minutes