Jobbing Foundry
The industry — Foundries
Base industry report for 3315 →- Establishments · CanadaA
- 159
- Under 10 employeesA
- 31%
- Establishments · USA
- 1,367
- Employment · USA
- 106,392
- Payroll · USA
- $6.9B
Of 159 Canadian establishments with employees, 31% have fewer than ten — an industry where large establishments carry real weight.
Entry signal — what decides who wins here
Structure decidesThe binding constraint is not executional. Being better than the incumbent does not, by itself, get you in — this one is cleared with capital, an asset, or a permission.
Take share rather than ride the market. Demand is flat, seasonal or policy-driven, so growth has to come out of a competitor. That is possible and it is slower, and it rewards an operator who can wait.
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.
This is not a probability of success, and it is not a verdict on you. No survival probability is published per market, and inventing one would be worse than saying so. What the bar reads is how much of the outcome sits inside an operator's control: green means the hurdles are ones a better operator clears, red means the binding constraint is capital, an asset or a permission rather than execution. Someone arriving with an advantage this screen did not assume can win a market shown in red.
Companies named in this market · 5
The binding constraint — growth quality
The pre-screen cut foundries on capital. Tested, that is not quite the reason. A jobbing foundry — melt, mould, pour, clean, ship castings to someone else's drawing — is a mid-sized plant, not a mega-project: 81 of Canada's 159 foundries, 51%, employ between twenty and 199 people, and the US average is about 78 per establishment [A]. Plants of that size change hands, and an entrant would buy one and not build one, since a new melt shop would also need a new air permit. The capital is reachable. The cut is what is being bought. The American Foundry Society counts 1,750 metalcasting facilities in the United States, against 3,200 in 1991 and 6,150 in 1955, and says 75% of firms have fewer than a hundred employees [B]. That is a population that has lost 45% of its members in a generation. Some of that will be consolidation into larger plants, which a plant count cannot distinguish from closure — but for a small jobbing shop the direction is the fact that matters: each year there are fewer of you, and the ones that left did not leave because they were bought at a premium. Castings are specified by drawing and alloy, so a buyer can move a pattern to another foundry, in Ontario or in Asia, and the foundry's remaining edge is lead time and proximity on short runs. The screen did not find evidence on the two things that would overturn this: whether surviving Canadian foundries are earning more as competitors close, and whether reshoring and tariffs have turned the order book. The nearest listed comparable points the same way: Ampco-Pittsburgh's forged-and-cast segment turned $292.6M of 2025 sales into a $44.7M operating loss, and its UK roll foundry went into insolvency in October 2025 rather than finding a buyer [A]. That is a roll maker, not a jobbing shop, and no jobbing shop reports. A full study would start there, with a specific plant's customer list.
A casting is made to a drawing and an alloy specification and ships on a pallet or in a container, so a buyer can place the pattern with a foundry anywhere. Short-run and heavy work stays close to the customer; volume work is quoted against offshore foundries. The competitive set is continental for a jobbing shop and global above a modest run length.
Who you would be competing with
The operators already at scale here, and whoever is buying these businesses. In most of these industries the competition an entrant meets is local, so this is who sets the terms rather than a list of everyone in the trade.
Financials & market size — sourced
Figures that came from a filing, a results release or reputable reporting, each carrying its evidence tier.
Market size, derived
Built from the competitor set upward rather than quoted from a forecast. Published TAMs in these categories are frequently reverse-engineered from each other, so any published figure is checked against the vendor arithmetic rather than trusted on its own.
Disclosed revenue from 1 of 4 named vendors. The market is at least this large.
No vendor has both a disclosed revenue and a published share.
Only a revenue floor is known — the true market is larger by whatever the undisclosed vendors earn.
Competitor set · 4 named · 1 disclose revenue
| Name | Revenue | Share | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ampco-Pittsburgh CorporationNYSE: APA | $434M | — | FY2025 consolidated net sales; the Forged and Cast Engineered Products segment was $292.6M of it |
| Grede / Amsted Industries / Waupaca FoundryUNVERIFIED | not disclosed | — | The large US private casting groups, named from general industry knowledge. No filing or disclosure was opened, no ownership was checked, and none is known to buy Canadian plants |
| Offshore foundries quoting the same patternUNVERIFIED | not disclosed | — | Not quantified. No import series for castings was opened for this record; the mechanism — a pattern can be moved — is general industry knowledge |
| The independent single-plant majorityA | not disclosed | — | 159 Canadian establishments (Statistics Canada, December 2023) and 1,750 US metalcasting facilities (American Foundry Society); 75% of US firms have fewer than a hundred employees. This is the competitive structure |
Evidence
Evidence. Establishment counts are Statistics Canada (December 2023) and US County Business Patterns (2022) [A]. The facility counts and the small-business share were read on the American Foundry Society's own About Metalcasting page, and the industry-size claim on its Industry Statistics page; an association's self-description is tiered B for the counts and C for the dollar figure, which carries no year or method. AFS's 1,750 facilities and the Census count of 1,367 establishments are not the same population, and neither source explains the gap; no reconciliation was found, so the two counts are shown side by side rather than explained. The Ampco-Pittsburgh figures — segment net sales, the loss from operations, the components of that loss, the backlog and the UES-UK insolvency — were read in the corporation's own 10-K for 2025, filed 16 March 2026 [A]. What that anchor is and is not: Ampco's Forged and Cast Engineered Products segment makes forged and cast mill rolls and open-die forgings, not jobbing castings to a customer's drawing, so it sizes the engineered end of the trade and not the shop this record is about. No listed pure-play jobbing foundry was found, no acquisition price for one was found, and no Canadian association series was opened. A falling plant count is not the same as falling output or falling returns, and the record says so in the reason. The cut factor is analyst judgment, resting on a plant count and on one comparable at the wrong end of the trade. In the competitive field added in a later pass, the large private US casting groups and the offshore competition are named from general knowledge and tiered UNVERIFIED; none was researched, and no Canadian buyer of foundries was identified at all.
Where the industry talks
The associations, forums and events where people in this trade actually talk shop — where to listen before entering, and where the first customers are found. Each link was opened on the date shown.
The national body for Canadian metalcasters; site carries membership, board and member-program pages.
Blocked automated access (Cloudflare 403). The main North American metalcasting body, cited in this record's own figures.
Technical association for steel castings producers.
Describes itself as the North American trade association for non-ferrous metal casting.
Trade publication covering metallurgy, moulding, melt and plant operations.
RSS feed returned a post dated 2026-09-23. Mixes hobby casting with trade questions, so read it as a shop-floor forum rather than an industry body.
Modern Casting (moderncasting.com, AFS's magazine) and castexpo.com both failed to open from this network - Modern Casting with a Cloudflare 403, CastExpo with no response - so neither is listed. The Ductile Iron Society (ductile.org) is live and is a further option.