Metalworking Machinery Manufacturing (United States)

NAICS 2022 code 3335 — an industry group (4-digit) that contains a single child industry, 33351. This is a short "pass-through" page: the group is effectively identical to that one child. For full detail — the five sub-industries, the investable names, the cycle mechanics — read the 33351 primer.

1. Overview

Metalworking machinery manufacturing is the tool-building layer that sits underneath almost all durable-goods production: before a factory can stamp a car door, mold a plastic bottle, machine a jet-engine bracket, or roll a coil of steel, someone has to build the machine, the tool, or the mold that does the work. In the U.S. government's official industry taxonomy — NAICS, the North American Industry Classification System — this activity gets a four-digit "industry group" code, 3335. [1][2]

The unusual thing about 3335 is that it has only one child one level down: the five-digit industry 33351, also called "Metalworking Machinery Manufacturing." Because there is nothing else beneath 3335, the two codes describe the same set of companies, the same revenue, and the same workforce. Every ground-truth figure for 3335 is therefore identical to 33351's. This page exists to record that identity and hand you the stats at this level; the substance lives in the child primer. [1][2]

2. What's inside — the one child, and why 3335 equals it

NAICS is a nested tree: a four-digit industry group normally splits into two or more five-digit industries. Code 3335 is one of the cases where the split doesn't happen — the group has a single five-digit child, 33351 Metalworking Machinery Manufacturing, so the group and the child are one and the same. [1]

That single child is itself where the real diversity lives. It fans out into five six-digit industries that build the tools and machines of metalworking (shares are each one's slice of the group's $33.87 billion of receipts and 134,208 jobs):

• 333511 Industrial mold — injection molds, die-cast dies, glass and rubber molds. ~$6.26 billion of receipts (18% of the group) and 30,855 employees (23%). [1][2]
• 333514 Special die, tool, die set, jig and fixture — stamping and forming dies, jigs, fixtures, gauges. ~$9.8 billion (29%) and 40,467 employees (30%) — the largest sub-industry on both measures. [1][2]
• 333515 Cutting tool and machine-tool accessory — consumable drills, inserts, end mills, plus toolholders and chucks. ~$5.55 billion (16%) and 23,991 employees (18%). [1][2]
• 333517 Machine tool — the machines that cut and form metal (lathes, mills, machining centers, presses). ~$9.26 billion (27%) and 28,524 employees (21%). [1][2]
• 333519 Rolling mill and other metalworking machinery — rolling mills, mill rolls, wire-drawing and forming equipment. ~$2.97 billion (9%) and 10,371 employees (8%) — the smallest. [1][2]

Those five run on three different economic clocks — bespoke project tooling (molds and dies, 47% of receipts, which leads new-product launches), consumables (cutting tools, 16%, which track factory utilization right now), and big-ticket capital goods (machine tools and rolling mills, 36%, which lead manufacturing capital spending) — which is the analytically interesting story. An investor watching this level therefore has three different leading indicators, not one. All of it is told in the 33351 primer; there is no additional structure at the 3335 level to add. [3]

One boundary worth stating at this level, because it is easy to get wrong: 3335 builds the tools, not the parts. The molders who use molds to make plastic parts (NAICS 326), the foundries that pour metal into dies (NAICS 331), and the machine shops that run machine tools to make parts (NAICS 332710) are all outside this group. Those customer industries are far larger; 3335 sells to them. [3]

3. How big it is (this level's ground-truth figures)

Federal statistics for NAICS 3335 (our ingested ground truth). Because 3335 = 33351, these are the same numbers you will see on the child page:

Those figures imply roughly $6.4 million of receipts per firm, about 23 employees per establishment, and average pay near $69,000 per worker — well above the low-skill-assembly norm, reflecting a machining- and toolmaking-heavy workforce. Pay is remarkably uniform across the five sub-industries, from ~$62,000 in molds to ~$75,400 in machine tools, and BLS puts the 2024 median wage for tool and die makers at $63,180. At ~$34 billion of receipts and ~134,000 jobs, the whole group is a small corner of U.S. manufacturing. [1][2][3]

And it is exceptionally fragmented — more fragmented, in fact, than any of its own parts. The group's HHI of 37.2 sits below every one of the five sub-industry HHIs (industrial molds 50.4, special dies 99.9, cutting tools 130.2, rolling mills 190.5, machine tools 314), and its CR4 of 9.4% is below four of the five. The reason is intuitive: combining five separate competitive fields into one union means no single firm can dominate the whole — a die-shop giant is a nobody in cutting tools, and vice versa. All of these numbers sit far below the 1,500 threshold antitrust regulators treat as even "moderately concentrated"; even the twenty largest firms combined hold only about a fifth of the market. This is one of the most dispersed manufacturing categories in the country. [2]

Undercount caveat — and it runs in both directions. Federal counts capture only establishments primarily engaged in the code, and they measure U.S. producers, not the U.S. market, so they distort the footprint in opposite ways depending on which part of the child you look at. For bespoke tooling (molds and dies), the data understate domestic production: a large volume of tooling is built captive, inside the in-house tool rooms of automakers, appliance makers and aerospace firms, and is filed under the parent plant's industry rather than here; the smallest one- and two-person shops are also easy to miss. For capital goods and consumables, the data understate the market, and the gap is large: U.S. machine-tool consumption ran about $10.5 billion in 2022 against roughly $5.9 billion of domestic production, and third-party estimates put the U.S. cutting-tool market near $15 billion in 2024 against $5.55 billion of domestic shipments. So the true activity, and the true demand flowing through the U.S. market, is materially larger than the $33.87 billion producer figure. The child primer works through both effects in detail. [3]

Two counting notes the child primer establishes, which matter if you compare this page to sub-industry data. First, the five sub-industry firm counts sum to slightly more than 5,301 (about 5,361), because a company active in two of them is counted once here — normal deduplication, not an error; employment, establishments and receipts add up cleanly. Second, employment depends on which federal survey you use: the figures above are County Business Patterns throughout, and the BLS establishment and productivity series run materially higher for the same codes (machine tools 39,600 in March 2025 versus CBP's 28,524). Use one series consistently rather than mixing them. [3]

4. Investable universe (where value concentrates)

There is nothing to add at the 3335 level: because the group is identical to 33351, the investable universe is exactly the child's. The one fact that matters up front — there is no clean, liquid, U.S.-listed pure-play in this level, and the real ownership is overwhelmingly private.

The revised child primer sharpens how the public access thins, and it is not along the three-clock axis. It thins along a different one: what is listed is almost always the layer beside the shop, not the shop. Mold components and molding machinery are listed; mold builders are not. Machine-tool controls and cutting tools are listed; the American builder base barely is. Mill rolls are listed; mill lines are not. Only cutting tools has a listed company whose core business is the code itself — Kennametal, at ~$1.97 billion of FY2025 sales with a $1.22 billion Metal Cutting segment squarely inside the level. The machine-tool sub-industry's lone U.S. pure-play is a loss-making micro-cap; the rolling-mill sub-industry's nearest U.S. name owns the in-scope consumable (mill rolls, $273 million of sales) inside a $418 million company; molds and dies have no listed builder at all, only proxies. None of the public proxies disclose revenue sensitivity to their specific NAICS code. The full name-by-name map — including Husky's arrival on public markets through a SPAC — is in §4 and §10 of the 33351 primer. [3]

5. How the money works

The economics are the child's economics, and they come in three shapes because the five sub-industries run on three clocks: project tooling (molds and dies) sells lumpy, engineered-to-order, largely non-recurring projects, billed on milestones and gone when the tool ships; consumables (cutting tools) sell a recurring razor-and-blades stream that tracks how hard factories are running; and capital goods (machine tools, rolling mills) sell big-ticket "iron" plus a higher-margin service-and-parts aftermarket, with orders leading revenue by months. [3]

Two cross-cutting cautions the child now makes explicit are worth carrying up to this level. Recurring revenue is the real quality gradient, and the listed proxies sit anywhere from roughly a fifth to roughly two-thirds of revenue on it (Husky ~65% aftermarket, Park-Ohio's induction business ~49%, Andritz Metals 27% service, Hurco 19%) — different companies at different scopes, so read it as a gradient, not a league table. And the disclosed margins do not average into an "industry margin": they range from Danieli's 12.3% plantmaking EBITDA margin and Kennametal's 7.1% Metal Cutting operating margin down to Ampco-Pittsburgh's 3.7% and Hurco's −6%, against the 30–60% gross-on-direct-cost convention private job shops quote, which is not comparable to any of them. The common thread across all three clocks: customer capacity utilization is the master variable. Detail and the metrics operators watch are in §5 of the child primer. [3]

6. Demand drivers

Demand at this level is derived — it comes from the capital-spending and new-product cycles of the industries that buy from it — which makes the group inherently cyclical. The shared drivers are new-product launches and model changeovers (automotive is the dominant end market at roughly 60% of U.S. metal-stamping demand, over 40% of global tooling demand, and ~39% of 2025 metalworking-machinery demand), manufacturing capital spending and the industrial cycle, factory utilization, reshoring and trade policy, an aerospace-and-defense surge (aerospace manufacturing-technology orders +45.1% in 2025), the U.S. steel and aluminum build-out, automation as a demand driver rather than only a constraint, and the two-sided electric-vehicle transition. On the EV question the sub-industries now converge on the size of the haircut from two independent directions: EV programs spend roughly 30% less on tooling per vehicle, and carbide cutting-tool use per EV runs about 25–30% lower than for a gasoline vehicle. The mix shift is real, and it is not additive. [3]

As of the latest available data the three clocks are not synchronized — and on one of them the underlying sub-industries genuinely disagree. Capital goods are in a clear order up-cycle and consumables are modestly growing (+2.5% in 2025). Bespoke tooling points both ways: the die primer reports quoting up 20%-plus and utilization climbing toward the high-70s in 2025, while the mold primer reports AMBA's 2026 survey calling shipments, backlog and quoting broadly stagnant, with automotive stalled for some shops. Both are survey sentiment, of different vintages and different member populations, and the hard data cut against the optimistic read — BLS real output for the die industry fell to 78.9 in 2023 from 88.9 in 2022 (2017 = 100). This page therefore treats project tooling as soft-to-flat with improving quotation activity, not as recovering. The full driver-by-driver treatment is in §6 of the child primer. [3]

7. Regulation

None of this is a licensed or rate-regulated industry. The regulation that moves it is trade policy, export control, and standard workplace/environmental rules — and trade policy is currently moving in both directions at once. Section 301 tariffs on Chinese tooling (generally 25%) act as a protective floor for molds and dies, but a late-2025 U.S.–China agreement rolled back roughly 10 percentage points of certain Section 301 duties; meanwhile Section 232 steel-and-aluminum tariffs rose from 25% to 50% in June 2025, and in August 2025 Commerce added 407 derivative product categories to the 50% list, including machining centers for working metal — raising input costs while pulling customer investment onshore. Alongside that sit dual-use export controls on high-precision (five-axis) machine tools under BIS, China-concentrated critical-mineral supply for cutting tools (USGS puts U.S. tungsten net import reliance at 50%), and ordinary OSHA/EPA oversight of machining operations — with two specifics worth knowing at this level: OSHA's National Emphasis Program on manufacturing amputations expressly names NAICS 333514, and the cobalt permissible exposure limit of 0.1 mg/m³ binds carbide grinding. Rate-of-return utility regulation, REIT (real-estate investment trust) rules, and reserve-based mining frameworks do not apply here — these are lightly product-regulated machinery businesses whose competitive fate is set mainly at the border. Specifics are in §7 of the child primer. [3]

8. Consolidation

Domestically, the level is fragmented and stays that way — the CR4 of 9.4% and HHI of 37.2 sit at the extreme low end of U.S. manufacturing, and each sub-industry is individually unconcentrated (HHIs from 50.4 to 314). But fragmentation here is not stasis, and low concentration means many survivors, not a healthy field. The domestic base has been shrinking for two decades: industrial mold manufacturing had 2,468 establishments and 46,722 employees in the 2002 Economic Census against roughly 1,250 establishments and 30,855 employees today — about half the plants and two-thirds the employment — and more than two-thirds of U.S. machine-tool firms closed after the early-1980s downturn, ceding global leadership to Japan, Germany and now China. [2][3]

The shape of consolidation differs across the five: bespoke tooling (molds, dies) consolidates slowly, mainly through an aging-owner succession wave — roughly three-quarters of tool-and-die makers are over 45 and about 40% are retirement-eligible within 5–7 years — that feeds private-equity roll-ups (Tooling Tech Group, Tooling Systems Group, SyBridge) and search-fund buyers, with consolidation far more advanced around moldmaking than within it. Consumables and capital goods are already globally consolidated at the top into a short list of large, often foreign majors, and deals keep landing (DN Solutions completed its acquisition of Heller in early 2026; Milacron passed to Bain Capital in March 2025). Note that the low domestic concentration numbers badly understate that global concentration, because foreign giants appear only through their U.S. establishments. Full detail in §8 of the child primer. [3]

9. Risks

The risks are the child's: deep cyclicality — the capital-goods sub-industries carry the most operating leverage, and the one listed U.S. machine-tool builder saw revenue fall from $227.8 million in FY2023 to $178.6 million in FY2025 with operating margin going from +3% to −6%; import competition and trade-policy whiplash, with the China cost gap put at 40–70% below U.S. prices for molds and up to roughly 40% for dies, held back only by tariffs that have already been partly rolled back; heavy dependence on automotive plus an EV transition that cuts per-vehicle content by roughly a quarter to a third on both the tooling and cutting-tool side; a scarce and aging skilled-labor pool, with BLS projecting tool-and-die-maker employment down 11% between 2024 and 2034 (55,200 to 49,300) even as replacement need generates about 34,200 annual openings across machinists and tool-and-die makers; volatile input costs (tool steel, tungsten, cobalt, scrap and energy); fixed-price execution and contract risk on the project side; elevated injury rates on the heavy-equipment side; technology disruption from additive manufacturing, digital quoting platforms and AI-assisted machining; and — for public-market investors specifically — very thin listed liquidity, with at most one micro- or small-cap pure-play per sub-industry and none disclosing NAICS-level revenue sensitivity. Each is expanded in §9 of the child primer. [3]

10. How to invest and outlook

Because 3335 is 33351, the investing conclusion is the child's. Public-market routes are all partial — there is no way to own the level cleanly on a U.S. exchange; the closest access is the cutting-tool consumables leader, then foreign machine-tool OEMs (original equipment manufacturers), a mill-roll small-cap, indirect mold/die proxies, and broad industrial ETFs (exchange-traded funds) for the capex cycle. The real, direct opportunity is private: the succession-driven roll-up of thousands of independent tool, mold, and machine shops, where the child primer's diligence checklist — recurring versus new-build revenue, backlog conversion and cancellation terms, quoted-versus-actual hours, workforce age, export-control history — applies across all five sub-industries at once. [3]

The near-term outlook is mixed by clock. Capital goods are in a genuine order up-cycle: U.S. machine-tool orders reached $5.74 billion in 2025 (+22.5%) and ran $2.77 billion in January–May 2026 (up roughly 32%), while metalworking-machinery orders ran ~$2.52 billion in the first half of 2025 (+13.7%) on an electric-arc-furnace-led steel build-out. Consumables are growing modestly — cutting-tool shipments of $2.56 billion in 2025, up 2.5%, with the industry cautiously optimistic on 2026. Bespoke tooling is soft-to-flat with improving quotation activity, and is a private-market consolidation story rather than a public one. One caution carries across the whole level: orders are not earnings. The lone listed machine-tool pure-play posted negative operating margins in both fiscal 2024 and fiscal 2025 while U.S. orders were rising 22.5%, because bookings lead shipments by months and revenue was still working through the prior trough. The full best-to-thinnest menu of tickers, private-market playbook, and forward judgment is in §10 of the 33351 primer. [3]

Bottom line: 3335 is a single-child pass-through. It is a small, cyclical, skilled-labor-constrained, reshoring-favored, overwhelmingly private corner of U.S. manufacturing that has been losing plants for two decades even as its strategic importance has risen — and everything an investor needs beyond the headline stats above lives in the 33351 primer.

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Sources

1. U.S. Census Bureau. County Business Patterns 2023 — NAICS 3335 / 33351 and children (establishments, employment, annual and Q1 payroll; sub-industry employment 30,855 / 40,467 / 23,991 / 28,524 / 10,371). https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cbp.html
2. U.S. Census Bureau. 2022 Economic Census, Concentration by Largest Firms — NAICS 3335 / 33351 and children (receipts, firms, CR4/CR8/CR20/CR50, HHI; group CR4 9.4% and HHI 37.2; sub-industry receipts ~$6.26B / ~$9.8B / ~$5.55B / ~$9.26B / ~$2.97B; sub-industry CR4s 9.1%/16.6%/17.6%/28.6%/19.3% and HHIs 50.4/99.9/130.2/314/190.5). https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/economic-census.html
3. Histometrics child primer, Metalworking Machinery Manufacturing (NAICS 33351) — the full rollup covering the five six-digit industries 333511, 333514, 333515, 333517, 333519, with the investable-universe map, cycle mechanics, demand drivers, regulation, consolidation, risks, and outlook. It in turn draws on AMT/USMTO order reports, the AMT–USCTI Cutting Tool Market Report, AMBA business-forecast surveys, BLS industry-productivity, employment, wage, projections and injury series, ITIF machine-tool production/consumption analysis, USGS critical-minerals data, USTR Section 301 and White House Section 232 actions, OSHA and EPA rules, and company filings including Kennametal, Hurco, Ampco-Pittsburgh, Park-Ohio, GPGI/Husky, Hillenbrand, Proto Labs, Xometry, Core Molding, Exco, SMS group, Danieli and Andritz. See primer-33351-DRAFT.md.
4. U.S. Small Business Administration. Table of Small Business Size Standards Matched to NAICS Codes — NAICS 33351 group, 500-employee standard. 2023. https://www.sba.gov/document/support-table-size-standards