On March 4, 2026, the European Commission proposed the Industrial Accelerator Act. If you work in public procurement and haven't read about it yet, you should.
The short version: the EU is introducing origin-based requirements for public procurement in strategic sectors. "European preference" — a concept that would have been borderline heretical in Brussels a few years ago — is now official policy.
This changes the game for procurement teams across the EU, including in Latvia and the Baltics.
What's actually in the proposal
The Industrial Accelerator Act sets specific minimum thresholds for European-origin content in public procurement:
- At least 20% low-carbon steel in public works
- Minimum quotas of 5% and 25% (depending on sector) for EU-produced aluminium
- 5% share of low-emission, European-origin cement
- Union-origin requirements for batteries, solar panels, heat pumps, wind technology, electrolysers, and nuclear energy tech
For electric vehicles receiving public support, at least 70% of components (excluding the battery) must be manufactured within the EU 27 member states.
These aren't voluntary guidelines. Once the Act passes through Parliament and the Council, they become binding criteria that procurement teams must verify in every relevant tender.
What counts as "European"
Here's where it gets interesting. The Act focuses on production site, not company nationality. A Chinese-owned factory in Poland counts as European. A European-owned factory in Vietnam does not.
The definition extends beyond the EU 27. Norway, Iceland, and Liechtenstein (EEA countries) are included. The UK and Switzerland could potentially qualify too, depending on how the final text shapes up.
Countries with EU free trade agreements or WTO Government Procurement Agreement membership get their products treated as equivalent to EU origin within the covered scope. So Canadian or Japanese products, for instance, would generally qualify.
The complexity here is real. Procurement teams will need to verify production origins, component sourcing, and compliance with these rules for every relevant bid. That's a layer of evaluation that didn't exist before.
Why this happened
The political context matters. The Industrial Accelerator Act is the EU's response to the Inflation Reduction Act in the US and China's industrial subsidies. Europe watched critical supply chains — solar panels, batteries, semiconductors — migrate to Asia and decided "strategic autonomy" required more than nice words.
Public procurement is the lever. The EU public procurement market is worth over EUR 2 trillion annually. When you set origin requirements for that volume of spending, you're creating a massive incentive for manufacturers to produce in Europe.
Whether you think this is smart industrial policy or protectionism depends on your perspective. What's not debatable is that procurement teams have to implement it.
What this means for Latvia and the Baltics
Latvia's public procurement volume — EUR 5.45 billion in 2024, roughly 13% of GDP — isn't huge by EU standards. But it's big enough that the "Made in Europe" requirements will have real impact, especially in infrastructure, energy, and IT hardware procurement.
Baltic procurement teams face a specific challenge: small markets with limited local manufacturing. For many strategic products, the supply chain runs through a handful of distributors who source from global manufacturers. Verifying European origin through that chain requires documentation that many suppliers aren't yet set up to provide.
Our advice: start asking suppliers about their production origins now, before the Act becomes binding. Build the documentation workflow before you're under deadline pressure. Suppliers who can clearly demonstrate European origin will have a competitive advantage — and procurement teams need to know how to verify those claims.
The verification problem
Here's where we see the biggest practical challenge: verification at scale.
When you add origin requirements to an already complex evaluation — technical compliance, financial assessment, qualification checks, sustainability criteria, and now European content verification — the evaluator's workload goes up again. And as we've written before, the team sizes aren't growing to match.
Every bidder will claim compliance. The question is whether their documentation actually supports the claim. Does the certificate of origin cover the specific components required? Does the production data match the delivery timeline? Are the sub-contractors covered?
This is exactly the type of cross-referencing work where AI evaluation can help. Not making the origin determination — that's a policy and legal judgment — but reading every document in the supply chain package and flagging inconsistencies, missing certificates, or claims that don't quite match the requirements.
The bigger picture
The Industrial Accelerator Act is just the beginning. The European Commission is preparing a full Public Procurement Act — expected Q2 2026 — that would overhaul all three 2014 procurement directives. The European Parliament passed a resolution in September 2025 with 432 votes calling for radical simplification. The current framework spans 476 articles across 907 pages of law. New EU procurement thresholds already kicked in on 1 January 2026 (central government supplies/services dropped to EUR 140,000, works to EUR 5,404,000).
Add the Foreign Subsidies Regulation — which has generated roughly 3,000 procurement notifications by December 2025 and already has a dedicated DG GROW enforcement unit — and procurement teams have yet another compliance dimension to navigate.
Every new criterion is another thing an evaluator needs to check across every bid. The arithmetic is heading in one direction, and it's not toward simpler evaluations.
Procurement teams that build capacity now — both in expertise and in tools — to handle multi-dimensional bid evaluation will be the ones that manage this transition smoothly. The rest will be doing what they've always done: their best, under impossible time pressure, hoping they caught everything important.
That's not good enough when the stakes keep going up.