Forging and stamping

Two trades under one code, both working to order. Stamping is the accessible one on paper — 124 of Canada's 181 establishments, 69%, have fewer than twenty employees, and a press shop running customer-owned dies can be bought from a retiring owner. Forging is heavier: hammers, presses, furnaces and heat-treat, selling into aerospace, energy and heavy equipment where the part must be qualified before it is bought. The pre-screen said "forging presses are the business". The test is whether owning them pays, and the one small forger that reports in public says not reliably. SIFCO Industries, an Ohio aerospace and energy forger, had fiscal 2025 net sales of $84.8M, up from $79.6M, and still lost $0.9M from continuing operations, after losing $8.6M the year before; adjusted EBITDA was $5.7M [A]. It ended the year with a customer backlog of $119.2M — about 1.4 years of sales already ordered [A]. A shop that is qualified, full and growing, and only just approaching break-even, is telling you where the value goes: the equipment and the approvals are sunk by the forger, and the price is set by a handful of primes on long-term agreements. The press cannot be redeployed, and the customer knows it. Stamping shares the shape at lower stakes. The die usually belongs to the customer, so the work can be moved by moving the die; the stamper owns the press and the risk of an idle shift. In Ontario and Quebec, where 87% of these shops sit, the customer is often an automotive tier whose volumes the stamper does not control. The ERP software sold to these shops is screened separately. Among the job-shop trades, the press-based ones are the capital-heavy end, with the least ability to reprice.