What is NUPCO? The National Unified Procurement Company, explained

Sell medical products in Saudi Arabia and you will hear the name NUPCO in your first week. This page explains what the company is, who it buys for, how it buys, and what a supplier needs before submitting a first bid. If your question is about the tenders themselves, go to NUPCO tenders: how they work; if the portal will not open for you, the answer is in NUPCO portal problems and fixes.

NUPCO at a glance

What NUPCO does

NUPCO was created to centralize the purchase of medicines and medical supplies for government health bodies instead of each body buying for itself. The idea is simple: the demand of hundreds of hospitals and clinics is pooled into unified tenders, so the state gets better prices and assured quality, and a supplier deals with one buyer instead of dozens.

• Unified procurement: publishing tenders, evaluating bids, awarding, and signing contracts and framework agreements with suppliers.
• Warehousing and distribution: a network of warehouses and logistics services that deliver what it bought to hospitals and facilities.
• Supply-chain services: inventory management and demand planning on behalf of the health bodies it serves.
• Health programs: the best known is Wasfaty, the e-prescription service that lets a patient collect a prescription from a community pharmacy.

Who NUPCO buys for

NUPCO's first customer is the Ministry of Health with its hospitals and centers across every region of the Kingdom, alongside other government health bodies that source their medical needs through it. That is why a single NUPCO tender is usually large: pooled quantities for dozens of facilities, and many items in one file, from gloves and syringes to complex equipment.

How NUPCO buys: from tender to award

NUPCO buys through tenders published on its own supplier portal, an SAP Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) system. The path a supplier walks is nearly the same in every tender:

1. Register as a vendor on the portal once, with the company's details, commercial registration and licenses.
2. A tender is published under a number with a prefix such as NPT or NDP, with its item list: material code, description, quantity and unit.
3. Download the bid response file, an Excel workbook holding the tender's items, in which the supplier fills prices and product data for the items it is bidding on.
4. Upload the file and the attachments (quotation, catalog, SFDA certificates) before the closing date.
5. Evaluation, then award: bids are evaluated technically and financially, preliminary and then final award results are published per item, and purchase orders or contracts follow.

Each step in detail, including how to read the item list and how to fill the file, is in NUPCO tenders: how they work and How to fill the NUPCO bid response file.

What a supplier needs before a first bid

• A company registered in Saudi Arabia with a commercial registration covering medical supply, and an approved vendor account on the NUPCO portal.
• SFDA licenses for regulated products: drug registration for medicines, a Medical Device Marketing Authorization (MDMA) for devices, and an establishment license. The bid file asks for these numbers item by item.
• A manufacturer authorization proving you may sell its products, plus the catalog and product data: trade name, country of origin, catalog number.
• A browser that works with the portal. The NUPCO portal runs on older technology that does not work in modern Chrome or in Edge's default mode; set the browser up before closing day, not on it. The steps are in NUPCO portal problems and fixes.
• Past award and price history. NUPCO publishes who won each item and with which manufacturer, so pricing blind is a predictable loss. See NUPCO award results.

NUPCO and Etimad: the difference in short

Etimad is the Ministry of Finance's platform for government procurement of every kind, for every government entity; NUPCO is a company that buys one category (medical products) for one sector (public health) on its own portal. A medical supplier usually needs both: NUPCO for the products, Etimad for everything else government bodies tender. The item-by-item comparison is in Etimad vs NUPCO.

How to keep up with NUPCO tenders

The portal shows open tenders to whoever signs in and sends no alerts tailored to your products. That is why ProcDuck indexes NUPCO tenders throughout the working day down to the line item, links material codes to your product catalog, alerts you when a tender matches a product or a keyword, and then fills the bid response file and generates the attachments from your data. Read searching tenders and NUPCO codes on products in the manual.