How to Become a Supplier to CPK Poland's Airport and Rail

For most foreign firms, the realistic way to supply CPK is one level down. CPK is the company building Poland's new central airport and its high-speed rail lines. It buys in large, staged packages, and the contractors and consortia bidding for those packages choose the equipment, materials and subcontractors inside their bids.

Four roles make that choice: project directors, package managers, procurement leads and design leads. Your job is to find those people by name for each package and start a conversation before the bid is priced.

The pipeline is worth the effort. CPK expects to open close to 100 procedures over 2026 to 2028, every one above PLN 1 million. It also plans about PLN 40 billion of tenders in 2026 alone, according to its investment proceedings plan.

Would a large international engineering, construction or energy group reply to an outside supplier? In my experience they do, when the message is specific to the package and the sender is clear about what they supply.

This guide covers the buyer map and the outreach. Qualifying for a specific procedure is a separate job for your bid team and the tender documents.

How does CPK buy its airport and rail work?

Skip the hunt for a supplier signup form and start with the plan. CPK publishes its upcoming procedures with start dates broken out by quarter and half-year, and values running from just above PLN 1 million past PLN 5 billion. CPK says the plan exists to help contractors prepare bids.

The 2026 schedule is front-loaded. Q1 carries about PLN 7 billion and Q2 about PLN 20 billion. Q3 drops to roughly PLN 3 billion, then Q4 rises to PLN 10 billion. That puts about PLN 27 billion in the first half.

The earlier a package goes to market, the less time you have to reach its bid team. Map the Q4 procedures and the 2027 to 2028 pipeline now.

Three features shape how a package is bought.

Some contractors are chosen through competitive dialogue. The government's progress report on the airport lists the competitive dialogue for the passenger terminal and its equipment as completed in Q2 2026 (gov.pl priority P32). A bidder's supply chain forms while a procedure like that runs. The same report, with status at 30 June 2026, planned competitive dialogues with the contractors for a railway tunnel and a railway station to start in Q3 2026.

Packages bundle design with delivery and installation. The baggage handling system procedure covered design, delivery, installation and commissioning (Ministry of Infrastructure, October 2024). The 2026 plan also covers the aeronautical lighting system, from design through delivery and installation. When the designer sits inside the bid, the designer decides which products the design assumes.

People are scored, not only prices. The tender for the Łódź high-speed rail tunnel weighted price at 70% and personnel qualifications at 30% (Ministry of Infrastructure, July 2024). Named individuals carry weight in these bids.

Decision rule: if you cannot say which quarter a package goes to market, you are not ready to contact anyone about it.

What is CPK actually buying in 2026?

This is what the official sources show, sorted by track, with the date each status refers to.

For scale, as the Ministry put it in October 2024: the first stage of the airport is designed for about 11,000 passengers an hour and about 34 million a year, and opening is scheduled for the end of 2032.

To decide where you fit, ask one question about each row. Is your product built into this package, or does it serve the people building it?

A conveyor component or a screening system belongs to the airport track. Tunnelling consumables or site safety equipment serve the civil crews on site, and the people buying them sit with the contractor's site and procurement teams, not with a systems package manager.

Who decides at CPK and at the contractor side?

On a CPK package, the decisions that touch a supplier mostly sit with the contractor. CPK runs the procedure. The bid team decides who is inside the bid.

When a construction-adjacent client gives me their target titles, I first ask them to look at their past projects and tell me who the actual decision-maker was. That answer beats any title that merely sounds senior. A list full of people called "Manager" goes back for a rebuild, because the niche has its own real titles and those are the ones we target.

For CPK, that means writing down titles like "package manager, baggage systems" or "design manager, rail stations". "Head of operations" will not do.

Then count the names. Start with the firms named in each package's procedure documents and award news, then add their consortium partners and design firms. Each role in each package adds up to a list you can actually write down: a countable set of companies, a few people per company. Before any message goes out, audit the lead list against the buyer map and delete every row you cannot place in the table above.

How should a supplier split airport and rail targets?

On my campaigns, each account and each rep owns a separate territory, so two teammates never write to one lead. For CPK, divide by track instead of by country.

• One owner for the airport track, with its own list of terminal, systems and design contacts
• One owner for the rail track, with its own list of line, tunnel and station contacts
• A shared exclusion list, so a contractor working on both tracks never gets two pitches from you in the same week
• Separate case studies per track, because a rail package manager reads tunnel references and skips terminal ones

A small supplier may have one person doing both. Keep the two lists apart anyway. The messages, the proof and the timing differ, and mixing them produces a message that fits neither reader.

How do foreign suppliers get into the buyer map?

The first goal is a conversation with someone who can shortlist you, specify you or forward you to the person who can. Asking for a vendor seat comes later. In a first message I sell the meeting, never the service.

Language follows the reader. Most of the campaigns my team runs go to the USA, the UK and the rest of Europe, mainly in English. International contractors and their consortium partners work in English, so English is the default there. A Polish firm's package manager will read a Polish message faster and with more goodwill. If nobody on your team writes Polish well, bring in a Polish partner and keep the local firms on the map.

A CPK consortium often has partners whose head offices are outside Poland, and the person who approves your scope may sit there. Check the country before you pick the channel. Cold email rules differ by country, Poland included, so confirm them country by country before you send; treat this guide as a checklist, not legal advice. For Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic, we use LinkedIn and do not send cold email without a compliant basis. Germany is not a market we specialize in; when a consortium partner's decision-maker sits there, we apply stricter rules of our own.

What makes a supplier believable to CPK buyers?

I target a local audience whenever I can, because a first message is easier to open when the reader knows you are nearby. A foreign supplier usually cannot fake that. You can lower the friction with a Polish entity, a Polish partner or a named person in Poland who can be on site.

Proof only counts once the reader takes you seriously. In my experience nobody reads case studies from a stranger, so the profile and the first exchange have to earn the second look. Once the conversation is open, I put real past projects and results inside the messages themselves, not behind a download link. A sender profile with zero recommendations reads as a warning sign to me.

The checklist before your first send:

1. Two or three references from comparable projects, with the scope you delivered
2. One line that states the scope you can take in a CPK package, in that package's own words
3. Certifications and technical sheets ready to send the same day someone asks
4. A local presence, partner or named contact in Poland
5. Sender profiles with real recommendations and a clear statement of who you supply
6. The contact's title checked against the buyer map, so the proof fits the role

Should you use LinkedIn, email, or both?

Both, in a fixed order. On a buyer set this small, the email is not my first touch. It follows a LinkedIn connection, so the reader has already seen a name and a face. A lone message or two will not carry this.

Package managers on a live bid are busy people, and short, human emails beat long templates that sound like a machine wrote them. Keep each message to one point: a relevant project, one question, a request for a short call.

That earlier campaign ran both channels side by side for the full 2 years. For spacing the touches, see this guide to building a follow-up sequence.

What not to do: send the same message to the airport and rail lists, attach a brochure to the first email, or open with a request to join a contractor's vendor database.

What should the first 30 days look like?

Set the right expectation before you start. When a client starts with my team, I recommend at least 3 months of outbound, because it needs time for feedback and iteration; the industry average to get an outbound program fully working is about 6 months.

A CPK package manager may take your call in week 3 and still not place an order until the bid is priced, won and mobilized. That is the attribution trap with outbound here: a first-month call can turn into a deal 4 or more months later, and B2B sales cycles of 6, 9 or 12 months are common.

Judge month one on direction. Are the right package managers replying, and are they passing your name to the design lead or the procurement lead? For the longer view, see how the first 90 days of outbound usually unfold.

A first month for a CPK supplier:

1. Week 1: build the airport and rail maps, verify every contact, and finish profiles and proof.
2. Week 2: connect on LinkedIn with package managers and project directors, then send the first short message.
3. Weeks 3 and 4: where the recipient's country allows cold email, follow up by email behind the LinkedIn touch; everywhere else, stay on LinkedIn. Leave real time between the second and third follow-ups, even if the third lands in month two.

Measure the month in conversations started, not calls booked. On a CPK bid, a package manager forwarding your references to the design lead is a good month-one result.

What does good outreach look like when the buyer set is small?

The CPK buyer chain is countable, and that changes which tools are worth using. When a market is small, my team and I skip intent data, because even in a market of 2,000 target companies the signals may show up on only about 10 of them. The CPK set is far smaller than that. An offer that speaks to the whole countable set does more than waiting for signals.

Countable does not mean you stop at a handful of names. Fifty "perfect" names a month is a coin flip: some will be busy, some not ready, some simply not interested. Here the extra volume comes from depth inside each firm, not from a wider list.

In practice, that depth means:

• Every relevant role at each bidding firm, not one contact per company
• Every consortium partner, including the ones headquartered outside Poland
• The design firms specifying each package
• The later packages in the 2027 to 2028 plan, mapped now while bid teams are still forming

If you can name the buyers for a package, map them by role and contact them directly. If you cannot name them yet, go back to the procedure table and the role table before you send anything.

Selling into the CPK buyer chain from outside Poland? You can book a call with me and we will sketch who to contact first.