The ICV bar moved

Qatar's tender evaluation rule compares bids on Financial Outcome = Bid Price × (1 − ICV%), so a higher In-Country Value score lets a bidder ask for more and still win. Among the 518 companies scored in both 2024 and 2025, median ICV moved from 15.3 to 24.1 — and 89% of that same cohort scored higher in 2025 than they had the year before.

That is not noise. It tracks the introduction of Qatar's cost-over-cost scoring formula, which rewards a higher ICV score more directly than the schemes it replaced, more than it tracks any underlying change in local content itself.

Translated into price, the gap between a 15.3 score and a 24.1 score is worth roughly 11.6% on the financial outcome formula above — before either bidder opens a spreadsheet. A bidder who has not moved with the cohort is quietly bidding from a worse position than a year ago, even at an unchanged price.

For the mechanism itself — why an ICV gap converts arithmetically into a price advantage, and what today's spread of scores is worth — see what your ICV score is actually worth in a Qatar tender .

Method: fixed cohort of 518 companies with a scored ICV in both 2024 and 2025 — a growing sample cannot manufacture this trend. Drawn from 2,497 scored company-years across the corpus, coverage 2020–2026. The ICV weighting actually applied is set per tender and is not always the full score; treat the cushion figure as an illustration of the mechanism, not a quote for any single tender.