Turkish Consortium Wins Tbilisi’s Tram Tender After Years of Delay

A Turkish joint venture will build Tbilisi’s first tram line in two decades after underbidding three rivals, Tbilisi Mayor Kakha Kaladze announced. The consortium, called EYE, offered GEL 287.7 million (roughly $107 million) to design and build the 7.5-kilometer line.

The contract still has to clear a 14-day appeal window before anyone signs it. It covers only the track and depot; the trams themselves are a separate purchase still to be tendered. Tbilisi has promised trams back before. This is the first attempt that has actually cleared an international tender.

A Turkish Consortium Undercuts the Field

The winning bidder is a joint venture of three companies, EmreRay, Yüksel and Erk, competing together under the acronym EYE. Kaladze said the tender drew four bids in total: three from Turkish firms and one from a Chinese municipal contractor, run under procurement rules set by the Asian Development Bank (ADB).

The same lender has separately backed a pilot overhaul of Tbilisi’s bus network, part of a broader push to pull the capital away from private cars.

Kaladze has said the state budget will cover the full cost of the project. The tender still followed the ADB’s own procurement rules, consistent with the development bank’s broader role shaping Tbilisi transit contracts.

All four bids landed close to or below the city’s estimate, a sign of real competitive pressure across the field.

The city’s estimate for the work was GEL 416.6 million. Even the priciest bid, from Doğuş, came in under that ceiling. EYE’s offer beat it by about 31 percent, a margin large enough that City Hall will spend weeks verifying the consortium’s technical qualifications before anything is final.

Under ADB rules, unsuccessful bidders get 14 days to file a formal protest. Tbilisi City Hall cannot sign with EYE until that window closes without a successful challenge.

The Deal Excludes the Trains

What EYE actually won is a design-and-build job, split into three stages.

• Conceptual design – a route-level plan setting out how the line and depot fit the corridor.
• Detailed design – engineering drawings for track, power, signaling and stations.
• Construction – building the line, stops and depot itself.

The route starts near the third and fourth microdistricts of Didi Digomi, a fast-growing residential area on Tbilisi’s northern edge, and runs via Davit Agmashenebeli Alley and the Digomi district to Didube metro station. It will have 11 stops and a depot built to hold 11 tram units.

That depot capacity matters because the current contract buys zero trams. City Hall says it will run a separate tender for 10 tram units, one short of the depot’s full capacity, leaving room for a spare car. Tbilisi is also running a second, unrelated transit upgrade in parallel: the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank has approved financing to replace 97 aging metro cars on the existing underground network.

The tram push also lands alongside other big capital bets in the capital, including a $150 million overhaul of Tbilisi’s airport running through 2031.

When Will Tbilisi Actually Ride One?

Construction alone is budgeted at 36 months once a contract is signed. Kaladze’s office says the whole project, including administrative procedures, should be finished within four years. That points to trams on Agmashenebeli Alley sometime around 2030, assuming nothing else slips.

Slipping is the part worth watching.

The tender itself took the better part of a year just to close. City Hall opened it in October 2025 with a December 22 bid deadline. That deadline slipped to February 16, 2026, after companies asked for technical clarifications. City Hall then reissued the whole tender on February 13 with a final deadline of March 31.

The appeal window is the next test of that pattern. Only once it passes will Tbilisi know if construction starts on schedule.

Tbilisi Has Tried This Before

Trams ran through Tbilisi for more than a century before the network shut down in 2006. Reviving them has been promised, and abandoned, more than once since.

1. 2010: Tbilisi’s city government opens talks with French firm Systra on rebuilding a tram line.
2. 2012: That first revival effort collapses over financing before construction begins.
3. 2018: A year after taking office, Kaladze’s administration pledges a separate above-ground metro line to serve 260,000 residents.
4. August 2025: Kaladze announces the tram’s return six weeks before Tbilisi’s municipal election, calling it the first tram project in Georgia’s independent history.
5. October 2025: City Hall formally opens the international tram tender at an estimated GEL 416.5 million.
6. December 2025: The bid deadline slips two months, and Kaladze quietly suspends the long-promised above-ground metro instead.
7. March 2026: Bidding closes with four offers on the table, ranging from GEL 287.7 million to GEL 412.6 million.
8. July 2026: City Hall names EYE the winner and opens the ADB appeal window.

Kaladze went on to win a third term that October, in a vote several opposition parties boycotted.

A Shelved Metro Clears the Ledger

The above-ground metro line that Georgian Dream promised in 2018 never broke ground. Officials blamed the COVID-19 pandemic for early delays, then largely stopped discussing it. In December 2025, weeks after the tram tender’s deadline had already slipped once, Kaladze confirmed the metro project was being shelved.

We hired European companies that carried out studies and found the project would cost around €300 million ($350 million)

Kaladze said, as quoted by the Georgian news agency IPN, adding that the price tag called the metro’s relevance into question. He said City Hall chose instead to prioritize extending two existing metro lines, a cheaper and faster way to add capacity.

The decision, detailed in OC Media’s account of the suspended above-ground metro plan, freed up budget room and political attention right as the tram tender was struggling to close.

The tram is now Kaladze’s clearest deliverable from a decade of transit promises. It is also, so far, the only one with a signed contractor waiting in the wings.

What City Hall Hasn’t Settled

One open question involves the route itself. Davit Agmashenebeli Alley will carry the central stretch of track. It is currently designated a green zone, and City Hall has not detailed what construction will do to it.

A second question involves how the public gets consulted at all. Bankwatch, a Prague-based watchdog that tracks development-bank lending across the region, has documented years of thin public consultation on Tbilisi transit projects financed by the ADB and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development alike.

Its analysis called the pattern “a Janus-faced beast, unsure of its own course of action.”

Neither question is likely to stop construction. Georgia’s tender rules do not require City Hall to resolve them before signing.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many passengers will each new Tbilisi tram carry?

Each tram unit is designed to carry at least 300 passengers, according to the project’s tender documentation, giving the line far more capacity per vehicle than the minibuses currently serving Didi Digomi.

How big was Tbilisi’s tram network before it shut down?

At its largest, in the late Soviet period, the network covered about 105 kilometers across 12 routes and ran as many as 300 tramcars. Horse-drawn service began in 1883, was electrified by 1905, and the whole system closed in December 2006.

What does the design-build contract actually cover?

The Design-Build (DB) model makes EYE responsible for both design phases and the physical construction of the track, stations, depot and control systems. It does not include buying the trams, which Tbilisi Transport Company will tender separately.

How much will the tram vehicles cost on top of this contract?

City Hall has not published a price for the 10-tram order, but earlier project estimates put combined spending on vehicles, track and depot at more than GEL 600 million once that separate tender is added to EYE’s GEL 287.7 million contract.

Was EYE known by a different name earlier in the process?

Yes. When bids were first opened in March 2026, Georgian media initially identified the lowest bidder only as EmreRay Enerji İnşaat Sanayi ve Ticaret Anonim Şirketi. The full three-company joint venture name, EYE, combining EmreRay with partners Yüksel and Erk, was confirmed once the winner was announced.