NAICS 336120Canadian industry · 6-digitinternational market

Heavy-duty truck manufacturing

This Canadian industry comprises establishments primarily engaged in manufacturing heavy-duty vehicles and heavy-duty vehicle chassis, for highway use. — Statistics Canada, NAICS 2022A

Establishments · CanadaA: 35
Under 10 employeesA: 51%
Establishments · USA: 97
Employment · USA: 38,385
Payroll · USA: $2.7B

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

1–41646%

5–926%

10–1926%

20–49720%

50–9913%

100–19913%

200–49926%

500+411%

Of 35 Canadian establishments with employees, 51% have fewer than ten — mostly small operators.

Where they areA

Quebec1029%

Alberta823%

Ontario720%

Manitoba720%

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 336, 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 336 Transportation equipment manufacturing

A tiered supply chain in which price is dictated downward. The reachable ends are specialty vehicles, trailers, truck bodies and aftermarket.

Who sets the price: A few OEMs, through tiered supply contracts.
The software it runs on: Automotive and aerospace quality systems, supplier portals, product lifecycle management.

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 3361 Motor vehicle manufacturing covers it.

Operating businessScreenedfiled at 3361

Electric Bus & Truck Assembly PlantStructure decides

binding constraint: capital intensity

Nobody screens a new light-vehicle assembly plant: the twelve Canadian establishments with 500-plus employees are the transplants of global automakers, and US County Business Patterns puts the average establishment in this group at roughly 750 people. The enterable-looking end is the one the electric transition seemed to open — a purpose-built electric school bus and medium-duty truck maker, selling into subsidised fleet programmes. Canada ran that experiment in public. Lion Electric of Saint-Jérôme delivered 852 vehicles in fiscal 2023 for $253.5M of revenue — and a gross loss of $5.5M and a net loss of $103.8M [A]. It had put $148.0M in 2022 and $72.2M in 2023 into its Joliet, Illinois plant and its Mirabel battery campus, plus $79.1M and $67.2M into vehicle and battery development [A], against an order book it valued at about $500M — an order book that, by its own definition, included vehicles for which subsidy applications had merely been filed [A]. In December 2024 it entered creditor protection owing more than $244M; a Quebec investor group bought what remained in May 2025, and the Joliet and Mirabel sites were shut [B]. The mechanism is the cut. Plant, tooling, certification and a service network are sunk years before volume arrives, and the volume is released by government funding rounds, not by the buyer's own budget — so the entrant carries automotive fixed costs at a few hundred units a year. Truck Body & Trailer Manufacturing (3362) is cut on the same factor for a cyclical reason; here the fixed cost was never covered even at the top of the order book. Upfitting and specialty conversion on a bought chassis is the reachable adjacency and sits in 3362, not here.

NAICS 33615 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: Automotive and aerospace quality systems, supplier portals, product lifecycle management.

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 →