Warehousing and storage
This subsector comprises establishments primarily engaged in operating general merchandise, refrigerated and other warehousing and storage facilities. Included in this subsector are third-party warehouses serving retail chains and wholesalers. Establishments in this subsector provide facilities to store goods for customers. They do not take title to the goods they handle. These establishments take responsibility for storing the goods and keeping them secure. They may also provide a range of services, often referred to as logistics services, related to the distribution of a customer's goods. Logistics services can include labelling, breaking bulk, inventory control and management, light assembly, order entry and fulfillment, packaging, pick and pack, price marking and ticketing and transportation arrangement. However, establishments in this subsector always provide storage services in addition to any logistics services. Furthermore, the storage of goods must be more than incidental to the performance of a service such as price marking. — Statistics Canada, NAICS 2022A
- Establishments · CanadaA
- 2,947
- Under 10 employeesA
- 54%
- Establishments · USA
- 19,979
- Employment · USA
- 1,295,120
- Payroll · USA
- $64.9B
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
Of 2,947 Canadian establishments with employees, 54% have fewer than ten — mostly small operators.
Where they areA
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.
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 493, 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.
A real-estate business with a labour operation inside it. Third-party logistics is entered through a specialty — cold, hazmat, e-commerce fulfilment.
- Who sets the price
- Industrial rents and contract logistics bids.
- The software it runs on
- Warehouse management 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.
No operating-business record sits in this industry — the records filed here are software markets, shown in the next section.
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.
This sits between the ERP suite above it and the warehouse system below it, both of which keep extending into it — and the pure-plays are leaving rather than winning. Two of the largest independents stopped reporting inside three years. E2open shrank in each of its last three published years — $652.2M for the year to February 2023, $634.6M to February 2024, $607.7M to February 2025 — and was taken private by WiseTech Global, the merger closing 2025-08-03 with delisting the next day and Form 15 on 2025-08-14 [A]. Coupa, which had bought LLamasoft to get network design, last published $725.3M for the year to January 2022 before Thoma Bravo took it out; Form 25 on 2023-02-28, Form 15 on 2023-03-10 [A]. The strongest anchor still filing is Manhattan Associates: FY2025 revenue $1.0814B, cloud subscriptions $408.1M growing 21% — but services down 4%, maintenance down 6% and licence revenue down to $14.8M [A]. Manhattan reports three geographic segments and nothing else, so even the best-documented company in the field publishes no planning line, and neither does SAP for IBP nor Oracle for Fusion SCM. That absence is itself the finding: this capability is sold as a module of something larger by incumbents who can afford to bundle it, and standalone by companies that have twice now been bought rather than scaled. An entrant is not displacing a weak incumbent — it is asking a buyer to run planning outside the suite that already ships it, which is a harder sale than being better. The 493 anchor is navigational: warehousing is where the inventory physically sits, not where this software is bought.
A WMS runs the physical building — mis-picks, mis-ships and downtime are immediate and expensive, so buyers select on reference and integrator depth rather than on price or interface. Implementation runs through system integrators, the same distribution problem that cut the MES record at 333. The top five hold only 25–30%, but the tail is regional integrators rather than a soft middle.
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.
Companies in this industry · 11
Every company this research names that is filed here or beneath — the operators, and the vendors that sell to them — largest disclosed revenue first. The rank is within the company’s own six-digit industry.
| Company | Filed under | Revenue | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Manhattan AssocNASDAQ:MANH | Warehousing and storage4931 | — | 1/5 |
| AnvylPrivate | Warehousing and storage493 | — | 1/6 |
| CoupaDelisted | Warehousing and storage493 | — | 2/6 |
| Körber Supply ChainPrivate | Warehousing and storage4931 | — | 2/5 |
| MasonHubPrivate | Warehousing and storage4931 | — | 3/5 |
| Netstock, Inventory PlannerPrivate | Warehousing and storage493 | — | 3/6 |
| Oracle Fusion Cloud SCMPrivate | Warehousing and storage493 | — | 4/6 |
| Oracle WMSPrivate | Warehousing and storage4931 | — | 4/5 |
| RELEX Solutions, ToolsGroupPrivate | Warehousing and storage493 | — | 5/6 |
| SAP EWMPrivate | Warehousing and storage4931 | — | 5/5 |
| SAP IBPPrivate | Warehousing and storage493 | — | 6/6 |
Who works here
The occupations employed in Transportation and warehousing, most concentrated in it first. The share is measured against the whole sector, not this industry — the published cross-tabulation stops there.
Tagged to this industry
Concentrated in this sectorA
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
Found across at least fourteen of the twenty sectors. In a small establishment several of these are usually one person, or an outside provider.
Inside this industry
1 row sits directly beneath 493, and 9 in all once every level is counted. Each has a base report of its own.
| Code | Industry | Establishments · CA | What is known |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4931 | Warehousing and storage | 2,947 | Warehouse Management Systems |