NAICS 33111Industry · 5-digitinternational market

Iron and steel mills and ferro-alloy manufacturing

This industry comprises establishments primarily engaged in smelting iron ore and steel scrap to produce pig iron in molten or solid form; converting pig iron into steel by the removal, through combustion in furnaces, of the carbon in the iron. These establishments may cast ingots only, or also produce iron and steel basic shapes, such as plates, sheets, strips, rods and bars, and other fabricated products. Electric arc furnace mini-mills are included. Establishments primarily engaged in producing ferro-alloys are also included. — Statistics Canada, NAICS 2022A

Establishments · CanadaA: 63
Under 10 employeesA: 51%
Establishments · USA: 314
Employment · USA: 79,317
Payroll · USA: $8.6B

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

1–42133%

5–91117%

10–19711%

20–49914%

50–9912%

100–19923%

200–49958%

500+711%

Of 63 Canadian establishments with employees, 51% have fewer than ten — mostly small operators.

Where they areA

Ontario2946%

Quebec1524%

Alberta813%

Manitoba46%

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 331, 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.

international competitionhigh capitalUNVERIFIEDinherited from 331 Primary metal manufacturing

Not an entry market. Foundries are the reachable fringe and are closing faster than they open.

Who sets the price: Global metal markets and trade policy.
The software it runs on: Process and plant-control systems.

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 3311 Iron and steel mills and ferro-alloy manufacturing covers it.

Operating businessScreenedfiled at 3311

Steel Mill & Mini-MillStructure decides

binding constraint: capital intensity

The pre-screen called this national-scale capital from the title alone. The filings say the same thing with numbers, and add something the title does not: capital is the entry ticket, and it does not buy a margin. The scale first. Cleveland-Cliffs bought Stelco, one Ontario flat-rolled producer, in 2024 at an enterprise value of about US$2.5B (C$3.4B) [A]. That is the price of one working mill. The 63 Canadian establishments are misleading as a count: 32 have fewer than ten employees and are not steelmakers in any sense that matters, while twelve employ 200 or more, and those twelve are the industry. Then what the capital earns. Algoma Steel, the other Ontario integrated producer, reported 2025 revenue of C$2,085.7M, down from C$2,461.7M, and a net loss of C$984.9M, with adjusted EBITDA of negative C$261.4M [A]. It paid C$225.0M in direct tariff costs during the year — about 11% of revenue — and took C$500M of government-backed liquidity through the Large Enterprise Tariff Loan facility to get through its conversion to electric-arc steelmaking [A]. The price of its product is set by the North American sheet market and its access to that market by US trade policy; neither is in the mill's hands. An electric-arc mini-mill is the smaller version of the same bet, not a different one: it is still a furnace, a caster and a rolling line sunk before the first tonne, selling a commodity. There is no entrant-sized proposition inside this group. What is sold to mills — scrap, refractories, maintenance, process software — is where ordinary resources reach, and those are other records.

NAICS 33115 vendors named11 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 and plant-control systems.

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 →

Inside this industry

1 row sits directly beneath 33111. Each has a base report of its own.

Code	Industry	Establishments · CA	What is known
331110	Iron and steel mills and ferro-alloy manufacturing	63	screened at 3311