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A special type of interaction and relationship exists between owners and public companies. Applying the business relationship perspective to owner relationships has some interesting implications. Contemporary theory assumes that the role of the owner is mainly providing financial resources (funding). Taking the business network perspective, the owner’s relationships are also important as these influence and shape interaction patterns including business relationships and thus the business network. Prior research has shown that the owner – especially if it is a business unit – can be directly involved in both the choice and development of specific customer and/or supplier relationships. These influences from owners can be much more important for the development of the company in question than providing financial resources. One consequence of applying this relationship view on ownership is that it offers the possibility of discussing public ownership in a similar way as private ownership.

In this paper we present some results of our exploratory research about Hungarian tender buyers activity and culture. We try to formulate some questions for future research. Hungarian bidding habits and behavior are not yet deeply researched. The goal of this pilot study is to take a snapshot of the Hungarian tendering processes from the point of view of the seller-buyer interaction. Content analysis has been chosen as the methodological framework because of its potential for examining not well structured, symbolic, mainly behavioral or qualitative data. The most important findings drawn from analysing 515 Hungarian calls for tender published in May and June 1996 are as follows: • ⊎buyers use a tendering process mainly if it is obligatory by law; • ⊎vernmental and institutional buyers represent more than 75 percent of bids; • ⊎prequalification tenders have a law rate; • ⊎projects are the most frequented objects of bids