Certified Tank & Pressure Vessel Shop
The industry — Boiler, tank and shipping container manufacturing
Base industry report for 3324 →- Establishments · CanadaA
- 303
- Under 10 employeesA
- 33%
- Establishments · USA
- 1,417
- Employment · USA
- 88,670
- Payroll · USA
- $6.4B
Of 303 Canadian establishments with employees, 33% have fewer than ten — weighted toward mid-sized establishments.
Entry signal — what decides who wins here
One thing must be trueEntry turns on a single condition that can be named and tested before much is spent. Clear it and this becomes an execution question; fail it and no amount of operating skill helps.
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 · 3
The binding constraint — growth quality
The reachable proposition here is not a can line — that is a continuous-process plant selling to a handful of beverage fillers — but a code-stamped tank and pressure-vessel shop: propane and fuel tanks, heat exchangers, process vessels, welded to a registered design for regional energy, agricultural and industrial buyers. It is a real small-business population (303 Canadian establishments, a third of them under ten people) and the welding-code registration that looks like a barrier can be bought with an existing shop. The cut is what the one listed Canadian owner of such shops reports. TerraVest Industries grew sales 50% to $1,371.2M in fiscal 2025 — and its base portfolio grew 1% ($725.6M against $717.4M) [A]. Every other point of growth was purchased: four tank and vessel makers acquired in the year. That is the shape of the industry stated by its best operator: demand for tanks is flat replacement demand, and returns come from buying shops, consolidating steel purchasing and spreading certified designs across plants. An independent entrant owns one shop in a flat market, buys plate at a worse price than the consolidator, and meets that consolidator again as the natural bidder when it wants to sell. The 19% adjusted EBITDA margin TerraVest earns is a portfolio result, not a single-shop one. Software sold to these shops is screened separately.
Heavy-gauge tanks ship poorly: the freight bill on a large empty vessel caps the radius, and pressure equipment must be registered province by province. Shops therefore cluster where the buyers are — Ontario, Quebec and Alberta hold 241 of the 303 — and compete within a region rather than nationally. Metal cans are the exception and were not screened.
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 3 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 · 3 disclose revenue
| Name | Revenue | Share | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| TerraVest IndustriesTSX: TVKA | $1.4B | — | fiscal 2025 sales to 30 September 2025 (C$) |
| Chart Industriesformerly NYSE: GTLSA | $4.3B | — | FY2025 revenue (US$); acquired by Baker Hughes and delisted in July 2026 |
| Worthington EnterprisesNYSE: WORA | $1.4B | — | fiscal 2026 net sales, year to 31 May 2026 (US$); a cylinder and building-products group, not a pure pressure-vessel shop |
| Independent certified shopsA | not disclosed | — | The competitive field an entrant actually meets: 101 of Canada's 303 establishments have fewer than ten employees and only 7 have two hundred or more (Statistics Canada, December 2023). None publishes accounts, so no per-shop revenue is on this record |
Evidence
Evidence. Business counts are Statistics Canada (December 2023) and US County Business Patterns (2022). All TerraVest figures were read from the company's own fourth-quarter and year-end fiscal 2025 release (11 December 2025) [A]; the 19.3% margin is arithmetic on two reported numbers. What they do and do not establish: TerraVest is broader than NAICS 3324 — it also makes furnaces, boilers, trailers and sells oilfield services — so its 1% base growth is evidence about a tank-centred industrial portfolio, not a measurement of the industry group. No single-shop revenue, margin or sale price was found, and none is on the record. Metal can manufacturing (33243) was deliberately not screened; it is a large-plant business with a different buyer. That flat demand is the deciding factor, rather than certification or plant cost, is analyst judgment. Added in the completion pass: Chart Industries' FY2025 revenue, the $210.00-a-share merger consideration and the July 2026 closing and deregistration were read from Chart's own SEC filings — the completion 8-K of 16 July 2026 and the Form 15-12G of 29 July 2026 [A]. Worthington Enterprises' fiscal 2026 net sales were read from its XBRL company facts as filed with its Form 10-K [A]. Neither company is a Canadian certified-shop comparable; they size the listed end of the same product space and establish who is buying it. No single-shop revenue, margin or sale price was found, and none is on the record.
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.
Shop-fabricated tank licensing, standards and member directory; steeltank.com redirects here. No member count stated.
Members are chief inspectors of US states and Canadian provinces/territories; issues NB/R stamps; runs a General Meeting and the Bulletin.
Annual technical conference; 2027 edition July 2027, Paris; participants from 40+ countries.
Free individual membership arm of the CWB Group, the welding certification body for Canadian fabricators.
400 members across Canada per its May 14, 2026 release; these are the buyers of propane tanks, not fabricators.
Welding standards, certification and sections; co-sponsor of FABTECH. No member count stated on homepage.
Standards body of shell-and-tube heat exchanger fabricators; small member group.
Blocked automated access. Search results show an active engineers' board on ASME code vessel design and manufacturing.
ABSA and TSSA are regulators, not communities, and are not listed.
Software serving this industry
Vertical software markets filed along the same branch of NAICS — who sells to these businesses, and who an entrant would have to displace.