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Dear Sir/Madam, 

# Subject: External quality assessment of molecular typing of Salmonella, STEC and Listeria Ref.: OJ/2021/DPR/23656 

ECDC is planning to award the contract(s) resulting from the above procurement procedure. The procurement documents consist in the contract notice, this invitation letter, the draft contract(s) and the tender specifications with their respective annexes. All documents are available at the TED e-Tendering website$^{1}$ (see specific link in the contract notice): https://e-Tendering.ted.europa.eu 

Economic operators interested in this contract are invited to submit a tender in one of the official languages of the European Union. 

## 1. Submission of tenders 

Tenders must be submitted exclusively via the electronic submission system (e-Submission) available from the above website$^{2 }$and accessible on the Funding and Tenders Opportunities portal (F&T portal)$^{3}$. Tenders submitted in any other way (e.g. e-mail or by letter) will be disregarded. 

In order to submit a tender using e-Submission, economic operators (each member of the group in the case of a joint tender) will need to register in the European Commission's Participant Register (http://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/portal/desktop/en/home.html) - an online register of organisations participating in EU calls for tenders or proposals. On registering each organisation obtains a Participant Identification Code (PIC, 9-digit number) which acts as its unique identifier in the above register. Instructions on how to create a PIC can be found on this page: https://webgate.ec.europa.eu/fpfis/wikis/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=308979301. Economic operators already registered in the Participant Register shall reuse their existing PICs when preparing tenders in e-Submission. 

Make sure you submit your tender on time: you are advised to start completing your tender early. To avoid any complications with regard to late receipt/non receipt of tenders within the deadline, please ensure that you submit your tender several hours before the deadline. A tender received after the deadline indicated in the procurement documents will be rejected. 

IMPORTANT:  In case of any problems with the submission of your electronic tender, you must contact the Support team in reasonable time before the time limit for receipt (see Quick Guide for Economic Operators: https://webgate.ec.europa.eu/digit/opsys/esubmission/assets/documents/manual/quickGuide_en.pdf). 

IMPORTANT:  In case of discrepancy between the total reference price indicated in the financial tender in annex II and the price encoded in the e-Submission application, the price mentioned in annex II shall prevail. 

