Georgia is buying 45 locomotives, and the notice says nothing about who could finance them
JSC Georgian Railway has invited bids for 45 main line DC freight electric locomotives and their long-term technical maintenance. It is a Request for Bids, and it closes on 30 October 2026.
That is the whole of the notice. What follows is not in it, and is not anywhere else either.
What the notice does not say
Across every goods contract the World Bank has financed in Georgia, 15.2% were won by a supplier from outside the country — 212 awards on record. The figure across every market the Bank finances is 5.1%. Georgia buys abroad at several times the rate of the corpus, which is the first thing a supplier who has never sold there would want to know and the last thing a tender portal tells them.
All 5 export credit agencies read here publish a position on Georgia. The country sits in OECD country risk category 5, and a sovereign obligor prices from 6.49% of principal under one agency's published tariff — the floor no participating agency may go below, not a quote.
That tariff runs down to CC4 and stops. Below that nothing is published at all, which settles whether a buyer can be covered before anyone discusses what it costs.
The part that is easy to miss
This contract is paid by the Bank. A supplier credit is not what finances it, so the premium above is the price of the market, not of this deal. It matters because the next one may not be Bank-financed, and because a railway that has just bought 45 locomotives will be buying parts, traction equipment and maintenance capacity for twenty years on somebody's paper.
Why this is worth writing down
Every figure above is published. The tender is on the World Bank's portal. The award history is in its procurement data. The cover position and the tariff are on the agencies' own pages. None of it is assembled anywhere, which is why a tender like this is usually found by the firms already selling into the country — and why the ones who are not there never learn it existed.