U.S. Nonferrous Forging — NAICS 332112

1. Overview

Nonferrous forging uses presses, hammers and ring-rolling equipment to shape heated aluminum, titanium, nickel-based alloys, magnesium and copper into strong, low-porosity components. North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) code 332112 covers forgings made from purchased nonferrous metal.[1]

The industry is small by federal headcount but strategically important. Its products include aircraft structures and engine disks, defense and space components, gas-turbine parts and forged aluminum truck wheels.

Public investors can obtain exposure through diversified aerospace and specialty-material companies or one small forging specialist. Private investors can acquire individual plants, finance equipment or invest in suppliers of billet, tooling, heat treatment and testing. Most public companies are imperfect proxies because their reported businesses extend well beyond this NAICS category.

2. What it is and how it is structured

Forging plastically deforms solid metal under compressive force. The workpiece is hammered, pressed, upset or rolled, usually after heating; it is not melted and poured as in casting. Equipment includes impact hammers, hydraulic or mechanical presses, horizontal upsetters and ring rollers.[2] Open-die forging moves stock between relatively simple dies and suits large or low-volume pieces; impression- or closed-die forging pushes metal into a dedicated die cavity and favors repeat production; seamless-ring rolling pierces and expands a forged blank into a one-piece ring.[2][3] The process aligns the metal's grain structure, improving strength and fatigue resistance versus many cast or machined alternatives.

"Nonferrous" is broader than aluminum. The important materials are aluminum and magnesium alloys; titanium; copper, brass and bronze; and nickel- or cobalt-based superalloys.[4] Products include airframe bulkheads, spars, hinges and landing-gear parts; jet-engine disks, shafts and rings; helicopter rotor components; forged truck and bus wheels; turbine and power-generation rings; and defense, space, medical and industrial components.[5]

The classification excludes:

• Iron and steel forging, which is NAICS 332111.[1]
• Metal stamping, NAICS 332116, and automotive stamping, NAICS 336370.[1]
• Forging inside an integrated primary or secondary metals facility, which falls under NAICS subsector 331.[1]
• Establishments that forge and then manufacture a specific finished product; those are classified under the finished product's industry.[1]

That last rule matters. Vertically integrated aerospace and metals groups can have substantial forging operations without all of their employment or revenue appearing in NAICS 332112.

Ownership is mixed. Large public industrial groups coexist with family-owned specialists, foreign-owned U.S. subsidiaries and employee-owned companies.

3. How big it is

Two federal data sources provide complementary views. The Census Bureau's 2022 Statistics of U.S. Businesses reports 50 firms, 60 establishments, 6,753 employees, $523.0 million of annual payroll and $3.19 billion of receipts for NAICS 332112.[6][7] The more recent County Business Patterns data for 2023 report 53 employer establishments, 6,018 employees and $521.4 million of annual payroll.[8] The small differences reflect different years, coverage definitions and rounding. The U.S. Small Business Administration size standard is 950 employees, meaning a substantial manufacturer may still qualify as small for federal programs.[9]

Data caveats:

• The $3.19 billion receipts figure is the best available government benchmark for the statistical industry, but it is not the addressable market for all U.S.-made nonferrous forgings. Integrated alloy-and-component operations, foreign production, captive forging departments and plants classified by their finished product fall outside this number.
• Census has released a 2022 concentration table, but the NAICS 332112 row could not be established from retrieved output; no current official CR4 or HHI is therefore available.[10]
• County Business Patterns and the Economic Census cover businesses with payroll, excluding nonemployers.[8][11] That omission is probably modest here because forging is equipment- and labor-intensive.
• The more important undercount comes from NAICS classification: integrated metals plants and establishments producing finished aerospace or industrial parts may be recorded elsewhere.[1]

4. Investable universe

The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) listings below provide varying degrees of exposure. Sales figures are total-company sales, not NAICS 332112 revenue.

Major private or privately controlled operators include:

• OTTO FUCHS, a family-run German metals group, owns U.S. aerospace forger Weber Metals, whose California operation installed a 60,000-ton closed-die press.[16]
• HBD Industries, a family-owned industrial group, owns Precision Metal Products, a high-alloy forging specialist.[17]
• Scot Forge is owned through an employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) and produces both ferrous and nonferrous open-die forgings and rolled rings.[18]
• Wyman-Gordon, part of PCC, operates a 50,000-ton press described as a strategic U.S. industrial asset.[19]

Howmet identifies Berkshire's Precision Castparts subsidiaries, ATI, VSMPO, Aubert & Duval and Weber Metals/Otto Fuchs as precision-forging competitors, with Forgital and Frisa also competing in seamless rings. ATI independently names PCC, Howmet and Aubert & Duval among its principal high-performance-materials competitors.[12][13]

These examples are not a market-share ranking; private financial disclosure is limited. The most common misreporting is to divide PCC, ATI HPMC or Howmet segment sales by Census's $3.19 billion receipts benchmark and call the result market share. That is invalid: those companies include foreign operations, alloy production, casting, extrusion, machining, fasteners and finished components that Census classifies elsewhere.

5. How the money works

A typical job moves from billet and die design through heating, forging, heat treatment, inspection, machining and finishing. Aerospace and defense work requires approval from the original equipment manufacturer (OEM), often for a specific part, alloy, press and production route.

The main economic levers are:

• Capacity utilization: Presses, furnaces, testing equipment and skilled labor create high fixed costs. Low utilization hurts twice: fixed cost is absorbed over fewer parts, while skilled labor and critical equipment must often be retained to preserve qualifications and recovery capacity.
• Yield and quality: Scrap, rework and failed inspection consume expensive alloy and scarce press time.
• Product mix: Complex, safety-critical and low-volume forgings generally earn more than standardized industrial work.
• Metal recovery: Raw-material surcharges and index clauses reduce—but do not eliminate—metal-price risk. There can be a lag between buying metal and recovering inflation from the customer. ATI disclosed that it used approximately 70 million pounds of nickel in 2025 and that a hypothetical $1-per-pound price change would alter costs by approximately $70 million before mitigation.[13]
• Contract structure: Conversion-only contracts, under which the customer owns the metal, have very different revenue and working-capital characteristics from contracts in which the forge buys and resells the alloy.
• Qualification and tooling: Customer-funded development and tooling can reduce upfront investment; supplier-funded programs carry greater launch risk.
• Working capital: Long-lead billet and work in process consume cash well before delivery. Costly titanium or nickel alloy may remain in work-in-process through repeated forming, heat-treatment and inspection stages. Backlog is useful only after adjusting for cancellation rights and material pass-through.
• Maintenance capital: A superficially cash-generative plant may merely be deferring press, furnace or control-system spending.

Public segments provide useful margin reference points, though none represents a pure NAICS 332112 business. Howmet's Engineered Structures segment—which includes titanium mill products, extrusions, machining, assemblies and aluminum, nickel and titanium forgings—reported 2025 sales of $1.148 billion, adjusted EBITDA of $243 million and a 21.2% margin. Howmet Forged Wheels reported $1.039 billion of 2025 sales, $296 million of adjusted EBITDA and a 28.5% margin.[12] ATI's High Performance Materials & Components segment reported approximately $2.4 billion of 2025 sales and $575.8 million of segment EBITDA, equal to 23.6% of sales; precision forgings, castings and components constituted 40% of HPMC revenue, but ATI did not isolate forgings.[13]

No six-digit federal utilization series exists for this industry. The broader fabricated-metal-products sector operated at 76.9% capacity in June 2026, versus a 78.5% average from 1972 through 2025.[20] That is useful cycle context, not a direct measure of nonferrous forging plants.

6. Demand drivers

Commercial aerospace is the most important current growth driver for high-value nonferrous forgings. ATI reported that 92% of HPMC revenue in 2025 came from aerospace and defense, including nearly 68% from commercial jet engines. HPMC aerospace-and-defense sales increased 14%, with commercial jet engines up 21% and defense up 24%. ATI also states that its specialty-material demand generally leads new-aircraft deliveries by approximately six to twelve months, making engine and airframe production schedules more useful than contemporaneous passenger traffic.[13]

The principal demand drivers are:

• Commercial aircraft and engine production.
• Aircraft-engine aftermarket and replacement parts.
• Defense aircraft, missiles and space systems.
• Industrial gas turbines and other power-generation equipment.
• Heavy trucks, buses and trailers using forged aluminum wheels.
• Specialized medical, energy and industrial machinery.

Demand is not uniform across aerospace. Engine disks, rings and rotating components benefit from new-engine production and the aftermarket's inspection and replacement cycles. Airframe forgings depend more directly on Boeing and Airbus build rates and customer inventories. Strong airline traffic or OEM backlogs can coexist with weak forging shipments when an aircraft program is constrained elsewhere in the supply chain.

Commercial transportation was weak in 2024–25: Howmet Forged Wheels' 2024 revenue declined 8%, EBITDA declined 7%, and the segment reduced approximately 160 net positions as production fell.[12] Howmet expected commercial-transport weakness before a recovery in the second half of 2026.[12]

Lightweighting supports aluminum and titanium in airframes and transportation. Howmet claims that its forged aluminum truck wheels reduce wheel-system weight by as much as 59% versus standard steel configurations, permitting additional payload.[12]

7. Regulation

Regulation and customer certification act as both costs and barriers to entry.

• The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) forging-machine standard, 29 C.F.R. §1910.218, covers guarding, inspection records, lockout, ram blocking and related press and hammer safety.[21] The work is hazardous: BLS reported a 2024 total-recordable injury and illness rate of 5.7 cases per 100 full-time workers in nonferrous forging, versus 2.3 for private industry overall.[22]
• The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulates applicable wastewater from nonferrous forming and associated finishing under process-specific effluent rules. Air emissions, spent chemicals and sludge are also governed through plant permits and hazardous-waste requirements.[23]
• Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement (DFARS) clause 252.225-7009 restricts the sourcing of specialty metals in covered defense products and flows requirements into relevant subcontracts.[24]
• The International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) restrict exports and access to controlled defense articles and technical data.[25]
• Nadcap, originally the National Aerospace and Defense Contractors Accreditation Program, and customer-specific approvals are not general laws but function as practical licenses to compete in aerospace.[26]

Trade policy is another moving variable. On July 20, 2026, the White House authorized a program under Section 232 allowing approved primary-aluminum onshoring projects to receive imports at half the otherwise applicable tariff rate; implementation depends on future Commerce Department procedures.[27]

8. Competitive dynamics and consolidation

Competition is narrower than the establishment count suggests. A customer needing a particular alloy, part size and qualified aerospace process may have only a few acceptable suppliers.

Barriers include:

• Large, expensive presses and furnaces—the largest installations, such as Weber Metals' 60,000-ton and Wyman-Gordon's 50,000-ton presses, represent strategic assets with few peers.[16][19]
• Proprietary metallurgy, die design and process knowledge.
• Long customer-qualification periods.
• Destructive and nondestructive testing capability.
• Scarce skilled labor.
• The risk that one critical asset becomes a plant bottleneck.

Historical consolidation reflects these barriers. When Precision Castparts sought to acquire Wyman-Gordon in 1999, the Federal Trade Commission identified only four viable suppliers for certain large titanium and nickel-superalloy aerospace forgings and required divestitures.[28] That finding concerned specific historical product markets, not the entire current industry.

Substitutes include castings, machining from plate or billet, extrusion, powder metallurgy and additive manufacturing. Forging usually wins where directional grain flow, fatigue life, impact resistance and repeatability justify the tooling and capital. Casting or additive manufacturing can win on complex internal geometry, while machining can win on prototypes and very low volumes without dedicated dies.[29]

9. Risks

Key risks are:

• Input availability: Titanium sponge and specialized nickel, cobalt and vanadium-bearing alloys are strategically constrained. USGS reported only one active U.S. titanium-sponge producer in 2023, with limited capacity directed to electronics after two other facilities were idled; its analysis put China at 65.8% of potential world titanium-sponge capacity.[30] USGS estimated U.S. nickel net-import reliance at 41% in 2025.[31]
• Operational concentration: A single press, furnace or qualified production site may support many sole-sourced parts. Berkshire disclosed that a 2025 fire at PCC's Jenkintown facility affected more than 700 sole-sourced parts, although PCC redistributed production without stopping a customer's line.[32]
• Aircraft, defense or truck production downturns.
• Customer, platform and engine-program concentration. ATI names Boeing, Airbus, Embraer, GE Aerospace, Rolls-Royce, Pratt & Whitney and Safran among important customers.[13]
• Alloy inflation, tariffs and cost pass-through delays.
• Scrap, rework, failed qualification or product liability.
• Outages at a unique press, furnace or testing line.
• Skilled-labor shortages and loss of metallurgical knowledge.
• Long-lead inventory and poor-quality backlog.
• Environmental liabilities at older industrial sites.
• Substitution by casting, machining or additive manufacturing.
• Overpaying for capacity that lacks transferable customer approvals.
• Deferred maintenance disguised as strong free cash flow.

10. How to invest and outlook

For public investors, Howmet offers the broadest large-company exposure, ATI adds vertically integrated specialty-alloy and forging exposure, SIFCO offers the closest listed specialist, and Berkshire provides indirect access to Precision Castparts. None is a clean six-digit NAICS pure play.

For private investors, the central diligence questions are more operational:

• Which presses, alloys and part sizes are genuinely qualified?
• Are customer approvals transferable after a change of control?
• What are utilization, bottleneck hours, scrap and rework by product family?
• Who owns the dies and tooling?
• How much maintenance and growth capital is required?
• Does backlog include cancellable orders or metal pass-through?
• Are environmental liabilities, pensions or customer-funded assets being assumed?
• What is the alloy ownership and pass-through formula on each contract?
• What is normalized working capital given long manufacturing lead times?

The outlook is constructive but uneven. In our judgment, commercial aerospace, defense and power-generation demand should support qualified capacity, while heavy-truck exposure remains more cyclical; Howmet expected commercial-transport weakness before a recovery in the second half of 2026.[12] Trade policy, alloy availability and strategic supply-chain risks add uncertainty.

The best assets are not simply the largest presses. They combine difficult-to-replicate customer approvals, reliable throughput, strong yields, disciplined metal pass-through and well-maintained equipment. Investors should pay for qualified earning capacity—not headline backlog alone.

Sources

1. U.S. Census Bureau, "2022 NAICS: 33211 Forging and Stamping," 2022, https://www.census.gov/naics/?details=33211&input=33211&year=2022
2. Forging Industry Association, "What Is Forging?," 2026, https://www.forging.org/fia/content/about/What_is_Forging.aspx
3. Forging Industry Association, "Product Design Guide for Forging," 2026, https://www.forging.org/Common/Uploaded%20files/Design%20Engineering%20Center/Product%20Design%20Guide%20for%20Forging.pdf
4. Forging Industry Association, "Metals Forged," 2026, https://www.forging.org/fia/content/about/design-engineering-center-content/Metals_Forged.aspx
5. Forging Industry Association, "Common Applications of Forgings," 2026, https://www.forging.org/fia/content/about/design-engineering-center-content/Common_Applications_of_Forgings.aspx
6. U.S. Census Bureau, "2022 Statistics of U.S. Businesses: Six-Digit NAICS Data File," 2024, https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/susb/tables/2022/us_state_6digitnaics_2022.txt
7. U.S. Census Bureau, "Statistics of U.S. Businesses: 2022 SUSB Annual Data Tables," 2024, https://www.census.gov/data/datasets/2022/econ/susb/2022-susb.html
8. U.S. Census Bureau, "County Business Patterns: 2023," 2025, https://www.census.gov/data/datasets/2023/econ/cbp/2023-cbp.html
9. U.S. Small Business Administration, "Table of Small Business Size Standards," 2023, https://www.sba.gov/document/support-table-size-standards
10. U.S. Census Bureau, "2022 Economic Census: Size and Concentration Statistics," 2024, https://data.census.gov/table/ECNSIZE2022.EC2200SIZECONCEN?q=concentration
11. U.S. Census Bureau, "Economic Census: Establishment and Firm Size Statistics for the U.S.," 2022, https://api.census.gov/data/2022/ecnsize.html
12. Howmet Aerospace, "Annual Report on Form 10-K for 2025," 2026, https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/4281/000000428126000012/hwm-20251231.htm
13. ATI, "Annual Report on Form 10-K for 2025," 2026, https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018963/000162828026010140/ati-20251228.htm
14. SIFCO Industries, "Annual Report on Form 10-K for Fiscal 2025," 2025, https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/90168/000162828025058405/sif-20250930.htm
15. Berkshire Hathaway, "Annual Report on Form 10-K for 2025," 2026, https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/2025ar/202510-k.pdf
16. Weber Metals, "About Us," 2026, https://webermetals.com/about-us/
17. HBD Industries, "About HBD Industries," 2026, https://hbdindustries.com/about/
18. Scot Forge, "Our Unique Culture," 2026, https://www.scotforge.com/about-us/our-unique-culture
19. Wyman-Gordon, "Markets," 2026, https://www.wyman.com/markets.html
20. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, "Industrial Production and Capacity Utilization: Table 2," 2026, https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/G17/20260717/table2_sup.htm
21. Occupational Safety and Health Administration, "1910.218—Forging Machines," 2026, https://www.osha.gov/laws-regs/regulations/standardnumber/1910/1910.218
22. Bureau of Labor Statistics, "Table 1. Incidence Rates of Nonfatal Occupational Injuries and Illnesses by Industry and Case Types, 2024," 2025, https://www.bls.gov/web/osh/table-1-industry-rates-national.htm
23. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, "Nonferrous Metals Forming and Metal Powders Effluent Guidelines," 2026, https://www.epa.gov/eg/nonferrous-metals-forming-and-metal-powders-effluent-guidelines
24. Acquisition.gov, "DFARS 252.225-7009: Restriction on Acquisition of Certain Articles Containing Specialty Metals," 2026, https://www.acquisition.gov/dfars/252.225-7009-restriction-acquisition-certain-articles-containing-specialty-metals
25. Electronic Code of Federal Regulations, "International Traffic in Arms Regulations," 2026, https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-22/chapter-I/subchapter-M
26. Performance Review Institute, "Nadcap Metallic Materials Manufacturing—Forgings," 2026, https://www.p-r-i.org/nadcap/metallic-materials-manufacturing-forgings
27. The White House, "Further Strengthening Actions Taken to Adjust Imports of Aluminum into the United States," 2026, https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/07/further-strengthening-actions-taken-to-adjust-imports-of-aluminum-into-the-united-states/
28. Federal Trade Commission, "Precision Castparts, Wyman-Gordon Settle FTC Charges," 1999, https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/1999/11/precision-castparts-wyman-gordon-settle-ftc-charges
29. Forging Industry Association, "How Forgings Compare to Other Processes," 2026, https://www.forging.org/fia/content/about/design-engineering-center-content/How_Forgings_Compare_to_Other_Processes.aspx
30. U.S. Geological Survey, "Titanium Mineral Concentrates and Titanium Sponge Metal—2023–2028," 2025, https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/sir20255021/full
31. U.S. Geological Survey, "Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026," 2026, https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2026/mcs2026.pdf
32. Berkshire Hathaway, "2025 Annual Letter to Shareholders," 2026, https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2025ltr.pdf