NAICS 325910Canadian industry · 6-digitnational market

Printing ink manufacturing

This Canadian industry comprises establishments primarily engaged in manufacturing printing inks and ink jet inks, whether black or coloured. — Statistics Canada, NAICS 2022A

Establishments · CanadaA: 41
Under 10 employeesA: 56%
Establishments · USA: 301
Employment · USA: 9,139
Payroll · USA: $654M

Size and shape

How many businesses there are and how small they are. Fragmentation is the first thing an entrant — or anyone selling software into this industry — needs to know, and it is one of the few things that is actually measured.

Canadian establishments by number of employeesA

1–41229%

5–91127%

10–19922%

20–49820%

50–990—

100–19912%

200–4990—

500+0—

Of 41 Canadian establishments with employees, 56% have fewer than ten — mostly small operators.

Where they areA

Ontario1537%

Quebec1332%

British Columbia820%

Manitoba37%

Largest four provinces by establishment count. Establishments with employees only — sole operators with no payroll are not in this table, so in trades and personal services the true number of businesses is higher.

How many new establishments are still tradingA

Manufacturing, US · opened 2020

86.2%

1 year

70.8%

3 years

58.4%

5 years

45.3%

10 years

opened 2015

Measured, not forecast: the share of US establishments opening in one year that were still active later. It counts good operators and bad ones together, which is exactly why it is the honest answer to “what are the odds”. It is for the whole sector rather than this market, and the ten-year figure comes from an older cohort because no younger one has reached ten years.

How businesses here compete

The structural profile of subsector 325, which every industry beneath it inherits. This is analyst judgment from how the subsector is organised — not research into this industry, and not a measurement.

national competitionhigh capitalUNVERIFIEDinherited from 325 Chemical manufacturing

Basic chemicals need plant-scale capital. Formulated products — cleaners, coatings, cosmetics — are reachable through contract manufacture, which moves the problem to distribution.

Who sets the price: Commodity markets for basic chemicals; brands and retailers for formulated goods.
The software it runs on: Process ERP, formulation, safety-data and regulatory compliance.

Market screens and studies

Market-entry records filed along this branch of the hierarchy. A record at or beneath this code is about this industry; one above it is about something wider that contains it.

Screened one level up. Nothing is filed at this exact code; the screen for 3259 Other chemical product manufacturing covers it.

Operating businessScreenedfiled at 3259

Custom Resin Compounding (and an unscreened residual)Structure decides

binding constraint: growth quality

This is a residual group and it cannot be screened as one market. It holds printing ink, explosives, custom compounding of purchased resins and an 'all other' tail that runs from toner to fireworks — 440 Canadian establishments, 52% with fewer than ten employees [A], sharing nothing but a classification. Explosives manufacture is a federally licensed activity sold to mines and quarries by a few global houses; it was set aside without research. The most reachable niche is custom compounding: buy resin from the petrochemical majors, add colour, fillers and additives on a twin-screw extruder, and sell pellets to moulders and extruders who need a material the resin maker will not bother to make. It is real work, the equipment is ordinary, and customers do value a local lab that will match a colour this week. The cut is what the scale player's numbers say about the category. Avient, which describes itself as the link between large chemical producers and processors of polymers, reported 2025 sales of $3.3B from 98 manufacturing sites, up 0.6% — and down 0.3% once currency is removed [A], with declines in consumer, industrial and energy end markets. A compounder is paid a spread between a resin price it does not set and a customer who re-quotes the job every year; when the volume pool is flat, the only growth is a job taken from a neighbour at a thinner spread. Printing ink rides on print volumes and was looked at no further than that. Anything attractive inside 3259 needs its own six-digit record; this one screens compounding and says plainly that the rest was not examined. The software sold to this branch is screened separately.

NAICS 32596 vendors named7 sourced figuresOpen →

Software serving this industry

The vertical software markets filed along the same branch — who sells to these businesses and who they would have to displace — and then the generic categories every business buys whatever it does.

No vertical software market has been recorded along this branch. What the subsector typically runs on: Process ERP, formulation, safety-data and regulatory compliance.

Catalogued categories — named, not analysed

Discrete manufacturing ERP SaaS 31-33

And what every business buys · 25 generic categories

Sold to every industry rather than this one, so they are filed against the software industry's own code. The same few vendors recur across most of them.

Who works here

The occupations employed in Manufacturing, most concentrated in it first. The share is measured against the whole sector, not this industry — the published cross-tabulation stops there.

Concentrated in this sectorA

Aircraft assemblers and aircraft assembly inspectors One industry 91.3%

Supervisors, assembly and fabrication One industry 88.3%

Machine operators and related workers in pulp and paper production and wood processing and manufacturing One industry 86.1%

Managers in manufacturing and utilities One industry 84.4%

Machine operators and related workers in chemical, plastic and rubber processing One industry 82.7%

Mechanical, electrical and electronics assemblers and inspectors One industry 82.3%

Machine operators and related workers in food, beverage and associated products processing One industry 79.1%

Machine operators and related workers in mineral and metal products processing and manufacturing One industry 77.7%

Furniture, wood, plastic and other products assemblers, finishers and inspectors One industry 73.9%

Machine operators and related workers in textile, fabric, fur and leather products processing and manufacturing One industry 70.8%

These jobs are mostly done here. An operator in this industry is competing for them against others in the same industry, not against the whole economy.

And the jobs every business has

Other technical trades Across the economy 20%

Technical occupations in electronics and electrical engineering Across the economy 16.3%

Shoe repairers, shoemakers and upholsterers Across the economy 15.2%

Administrative and financial supervisors Across the economy 11.6%

Technical inspectors and regulatory officers Across the economy 10.7%

Administrative services managers Across the economy 9.6%

Legislative and senior managers Across the economy 9.2%

Building maintenance installers, servicers and repairers Across the economy 8.3%

Financial, insurance and related administrative support workers Across the economy 7.7%

Technical occupations in computer and information systems Across the economy 4.8%

Found across at least fourteen of the twenty sectors. In a small establishment several of these are usually one person, or an outside provider.

All 162 occupations →