Coating, engraving, cold and heat treating and allied activities

This is the service end of metalworking: a machine shop sends parts out to be hardened, plated, anodised or coated and gets them back in days. The customer base is local and sticky, the work is priced per lot rather than bid against imports, and most of Canada's 584 establishments are small — 64% employ between five and forty-nine people. The cut is what the process costs to own. Bodycote, the largest listed heat treater, earned a 15.7% adjusted operating margin on £727.1M of revenue in 2025 — and spent £77.0M on capital expenditure, 10.6% of revenue, across 136 locations [A]. That is roughly £5M of revenue per plant, each a building full of furnaces, atmospheres and quench systems that burn energy whether or not the racks are full. More telling is what it is doing with its ordinary plants: 31 sites have been declared non-core — described by the company as "older, less efficient and more carbon-intensive" heat treatment serving automotive and general industry — and are being closed, merged or sold, ten of them in France in one transaction [A]. Revenue fell 4%. The general-purpose shop serving local industry is precisely what the scale operator is exiting; the margin sits in aerospace, gas-turbine and specialist processes that require accreditation and years of customer qualification. Plating adds a second weight the heat treater escapes — chemical baths, wastewater permits and the contamination history of any site bought. An entrant can buy a shop, but it buys a furnace-replacement schedule with it.