Tender won back.

A generics manufacturer had lost the awards on several high-revenue focus molecules in the rebate-contract tenders to more price-aggressive competitors. With every lost tender, it was not a market share that disappeared but the entire volume for the contract term, and with it utilisation in its own plants.

The German generics market does not work by supply and demand but by state price control. More than seventy percent of revenue runs through rebate contracts under Section 130a SGB V. The health insurers tender patent-free active ingredients in cycles and usually award the contract exclusively to a single supplier. Whoever loses loses everything. The total-loss mechanism knows no second place.

The real bottleneck was not the maths but the steering. Tender decisions were taken operationally and in isolation, without strategic ownership at leadership level. What was missing was someone who decides, across the entire portfolio, which tenders fit the company and its plants, and who lines up supply chain, regulatory and production behind every commitment.

Another lost tender round would have hit the plants' fixed-cost degression directly. Generics production lives on utilisation; if volume falls away, the unit costs of the remaining products rise, and the next tender becomes even harder to win. A downward spiral.

The opposite reflex was just as dangerous: answering every lost tender with a bid at any price simply to fill the plants. Without strategic steering, the company risked swinging between both errors, winning uneconomic tenders or losing strategically important molecules. Both variants of the same steering deficit.

ANDRIS Consulting set up the mandate as a discreet direct approach, not as a tender through applicant databases. What was needed was not a better calculator but a leader who owns tender strategy across the entire portfolio.

The search focus was on senior tender management leaders from leading generics companies who have genuinely run tender strategy: who decide which tenders fit the portfolio and the plants, and who line up supply chain, regulatory and production behind every two-year commitment. Such profiles are visible in no applicant database and do not respond to job ads; we approached them personally and discreetly.

Alongside technical depth, attitude and cultural fit were decisive. What was needed was decisiveness: the courage to defend profitable tenders consistently and to concede low-margin ones deliberately, rather than securing volume at any price.

The role was filled from a leading generics company with a leader who had already owned tender strategy at this level. They turned tender participation into a deliberate portfolio decision rather than a reactive task.

In the following tender round, one strategically important tender was deliberately won back. Two others the company let go on purpose, because the achievable margin did not justify them. Instead of securing volume at any price, the focus shifted to opportunities that fill the plants and at the same time deliver meaningful margin.

A reactive, driven function thus became a strategically led one, with a clear line on where the company fights and where it holds back.