Computer and Peripheral Equipment Manufacturing (U.S.)

NAICS 2022 code 3341 — the four-digit industry group covering the manufacture of finished computing hardware in the United States: the computers themselves, the drives that store their data, and the terminals and peripherals around them.

("NAICS" is the North American Industry Classification System, the standard code framework U.S. statistical agencies use to define industries. A four-digit code like 3341 is an "industry group," a rollup that contains more detailed five- and six-digit industries beneath it.)

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1. Overview

NAICS 3341 is the level of the industry classification where "computer hardware manufacturing" lives as a named category. It sits directly above the finished-goods factories that build computers, storage drives, and peripheral equipment on U.S. soil.

The single most important fact about this level is structural: 3341 contains exactly one child industry, 33411, and the two are for all practical purposes the same thing. Every establishment, worker, dollar of receipts, and concentration figure the government reports for 3341 is identical to what it reports for 33411. This primer is therefore short by design — it gives you this level's official numbers and the things worth understanding about its structure, then points you to the full 33411 primer for the detail.

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2. What's inside — and why the level equals its one child

Under the NAICS rules, industry group 3341 breaks down into a single industry, 33411 — Computer and Peripheral Equipment Manufacturing, which in turn splits into three six-digit businesses:

• 334111 — Electronic Computer Manufacturing: finished computers, from laptops to artificial-intelligence (AI) data-center servers to mainframes — ~59% of the level's receipts but ~38% of its factory sites (212 of 557) [1].
• 334112 — Computer Storage Device Manufacturing: hard disk drives (HDDs), solid-state drives (SSDs), and tape units — ~24% of receipts on just ~11% of sites (61), the capital-intensive extreme [1].
• 334118 — Computer Terminal and Other Computer Peripheral Equipment Manufacturing: printers, monitors, keyboards, mice, scanners, point-of-sale (POS) terminals, and automated teller machines (ATMs) — ~17% of receipts across ~51% of the sites (284) [1].

Because 33411 is the only industry inside 3341, there is nothing to "add up" at this level — the industry group and the industry are the same population of firms. The interesting variation is one level further down, across the three six-digit children, where the businesses differ sharply in size, growth, ownership, and how the money is made. Two contrasts are worth carrying up here because they define the shape of the whole level:

• Value is dense in computers and storage; bodies are dense in peripherals. The two AI-exposed children hold ~83% of receipts on ~49% of the sites and pay the most per worker (roughly $138K and $129K of average annual payroll, against ~$99K in peripherals) [1].
• The AI wave splits the level's margins in opposite directions. The same memory-cost inflation that is expanding storage margins is compressing computer margins and reaching peripherals as a pure cost with no demand offset. At the level this is a transfer of profit between children, not a uniform tailwind or headwind [1].

A corrective to the receipts-weighted view: by the Small Business Administration's own size standards, 86.5% of the computer child's firms and 96.5% of the peripheral child's firms are small businesses [1][5]. This is a level of a few giants and several hundred small shops, not a level of giants alone. The full three-way comparison — direction of travel, margins, ownership, and how to buy each — is the subject of the 33411 primer and is not repeated here.

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3. How big it is

Our ground-truth federal figures for NAICS 3341 (identical to 33411):

(CR4/CR8/etc. = combined revenue share of the largest 4, 8, and so on firms — standard market-concentration measures. The HHI sums the squared market shares of all firms; U.S. antitrust agencies generally treat anything below ~1,500 as "unconcentrated.")

The six-digit detail ties out to this level, which is a good sign the data is clean. Establishments, employment, payroll, and receipts all reconcile from the three six-digit businesses to the 557 / 31,508 / $3.84B / $19.84B reported here [1][2][3]. The one exception is firm count: the six-digit levels sum to 387 against 384 here, because a firm operating in more than one of the three is counted once at the rollup but can appear in each child. Firm counts are not additive; the rest are.

The $19.84 billion is a 2022 vintage, and it is a floor. Two of the three six-digit businesses now carry later federal readings of their own domestic activity that run above their Economic Census receipts — $14.07 billion of sales/shipments for the computer child in the Census Annual Integrated Economic Survey for 2023, and $4.2 billion of 2025 shipments for the peripheral child in the Census M3 series (up from $3.7 billion in 2024, on a series that may not be exactly coterminous with the industry) [1]. These are different surveys with different scopes and years and should not be added into a new level total; read them as evidence that the domestic footprint has grown since the 2022 benchmark, not as a replacement for it.

The number is small on purpose — read it as the domestic factory footprint, not the U.S. computer-hardware business. Federal manufacturing statistics count only production physically located in the United States. The marquee U.S. brands (Apple, Dell, HP, Seagate, Zebra) design here but build offshore, and that revenue is booked under wholesale, retail, or corporate categories rather than domestic manufacturing. The undercount is enormous: Apple's Mac line alone earned about $33.7 billion in fiscal 2025 — roughly 1.7 times this entire level's measured receipts — almost none of it counted here [1][4]. Seagate ($9.097 billion) and Western Digital's post-separation hard-drive business ($9.520 billion) each booked close to half the level again in a single fiscal year, and U.S. imports of computer hardware and semiconductors topped $450 billion in 2025 [1]. Expect the true U.S. computer-hardware business to be roughly an order of magnitude larger than the $19.84 billion once offshore production and imports are included.

The undercount is not spread evenly, and it hides ownership differently in each child. In computers and storage the missing mass is offshore plants owned by large public companies, so public investors can still reach it through the parent stocks (Western Digital employs roughly 40,000 people with 88% in Asia-Pacific; about 25,000 of Seagate's 30,000 are in Asia). In peripherals there is additionally a genuine long tail of small private domestic firms — 201 firms across 284 establishments averaging about 39 employees — whose economic weight is thin in receipts but real in headcount [1].

One further rollup nuance: this level is the only place the family gets an official concentration index. The Census suppresses the HHI for all three six-digit children individually, publishing it only here [1][3].

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4. The investable universe

There is no single "computer-hardware manufacturing" stock and no U.S.-listed fund dedicated to NAICS 3341. Because the level equals its one child, the investable map is exactly 33411's: value pools in different places across the three six-digit businesses, and several large public names span more than one at once (HP makes PCs and printers; Dell is both the fastest-growing AI-server vendor and the largest external enterprise-storage vendor at 22.7% share; HPE and IBM straddle computers and storage). The condensed picture:

• Computers (~59% of the level's receipts): the AI-server cycle is the prize — Dell (DELL), Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Super Micro (SMCI), IBM (IBM), HP Inc. (HPQ), and the integrated Apple (AAPL), plus the Taiwan original-design manufacturers (ODMs) that physically build most servers [1].
• Storage (~24%): a rare pricing-power window in hard drives — Seagate (STX), Western Digital (WDC) — plus memory makers Micron (MU) and SanDisk (SNDK), storage-systems names NetApp (NTAP) and Pure Storage (PSTG), and tape specialist Quantum (QMCO) [1].
• Peripherals (~17%): mature, cash-generative, recurring-revenue plays — Zebra (ZBRA), Logitech (LOGI), HP printing (HPQ), NCR Voyix (VYX), Diebold Nixdorf (DBD), Xerox (XRX), Corsair (CRSR). Note that NCR Atleos (NATL) is pending acquisition by Brink's, so the listed pure-play ATM exposure is on its way out [1].

Private-market exposure differs by child — most open in peripherals (private-equity-owned payment, kiosk, and rugged-hardware specialists on the Verifone template), nearly closed in storage, where private money goes into controller chips and storage software rather than drive factories. Full tables, roles, and scale figures are in the 33411 primer. One adjacency shapes the whole level but sits outside it: Nvidia (NVDA) is classified as a semiconductor maker, not a computer maker, yet it captures an estimated ~90% of AI-accelerator spending and sets the economics for the computer and storage children alike [1].

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5. How the money works

All of 3341 is a manufacturing business, so the economics run on capacity, input costs, product mix, and cyclicality — not on utility rate base, real-estate occupancy, or asset-management fees. The level's central lesson, carried straight up from its child: the metal box is rarely where the money is. Assembling a commodity PC or server earns low-single-digit margins; durable profit lives in mix (an AI server loaded with graphics processing units, or GPUs, sells for many times a plain one), scale, proprietary platforms (IBM's mainframe, Apple's chip-plus-operating-system integration), cost-per-terabyte discipline in storage, and — in peripherals — recurring revenue from consumables, software, and services attached to the hardware [1].

Two features are genuinely level-wide rather than child-specific. First, the profit split created by memory-cost inflation: where a shortage exists the maker keeps the price increase (storage margins have expanded sharply), but where the expensive part is a bought-in chip it passes straight through, so revenue dollars explode while gross-margin percentage falls (computers), and where there is no demand offset at all it is simply a cost (peripherals) [1]. Second, customer concentration on the buy side: the same handful of hyperscalers sets the order book across most of the level — cloud customers alone account for 88% of Western Digital's revenue and its top ten customers 68% [1]. See the 33411 primer for the per-child breakdown.

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6. What drives demand

• AI data-center build-out (dominant for two of the three children). Hyperscalers plan on the order of $600–725 billion of capital spending in 2026, up from roughly $410 billion in 2025, about half of it on servers and chips [1]. This single wave lifts the computer child (AI servers) and the storage child (the data those models retain), and supplies no demand at all to peripherals.
• PC and enterprise refresh cycles. Multi-year replacement waves set the baseline for computers and consumer peripherals; 2025 shipments grew, helped by Windows 10's end of support, but Gartner forecasts a ~10% decline in 2026 as DRAM and SSD prices rise ~130% [1].
• The data explosion, independent of AI. Video, backups, and regulatory archives grow relentlessly, underpinning storage — with tiering (flash for performance, hard drives for bulk, tape for archive) the likely outcome rather than a single winner [1].
• Retail, banking, and logistics capital budgets. Self-checkout, ATM/branch transformation, and warehouse automation drive the peripherals child on a separate, more mature clock [1].
• Government and defense procurement. A policy-sensitive slice of demand across all three, and an incentive for U.S.-based assembly [1].

The contrast is the point: computers and storage share one demand engine (AI capital spending); peripherals runs on a different one and feels AI only through input costs. A shock to hyperscaler budgets would hit the ~83% of the level's receipts sitting in its two AI-exposed children hard, and the last child barely at all.

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7. Regulation

None of this level is a heavily licensed industry, but it meets policy at four edges [1]:

• Trade and national-security policy (heaviest on computers and storage): the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) restricts exports of advanced AI chips and computers, moving in January 2026 to case-by-case review for specified products, while a 25% Section 232 (national-security) tariff on certain advanced semiconductors flows through to finished-system prices and reshapes where hardware is assembled.
• Enforcement is not theoretical: BIS imposed a $300 million civil penalty on Seagate over hard-drive sales to Huawei, with audit obligations and a suspended denial order — the level's clearest evidence that export-control exposure is a live financial risk rather than a compliance formality.
• Industrial subsidy — upstream: the CHIPS and Science Act subsidizes domestic semiconductor fabrication (Micron secured up to $6.1 billion), not final computer/drive/peripheral assembly, but reshapes the chip supply chain all three children depend on.
• Payment, accessibility, and product regimes (heaviest on peripherals): POS terminals and ATMs must meet Payment Card Industry (PCI), EMV chip, Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), and Section 508 standards; monitors and printers face emissions, safety, energy, and e-waste rules plus a growing wave of state right-to-repair laws. Buy-American and Trade Agreements Act rules govern federal purchases across all three.

The net effect at this level: a maker's addressable market, cost structure, and factory location are now partly set in Washington — most acutely in the two AI-exposed children.

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8. Consolidation

The level's consolidation story is its child's. Storage collapsed from dozens of hard-drive makers in the 1990s to three today (Western Digital, Seagate, Toshiba, together shipping more than 95% of drives), with a 2025 twist toward focus (Western Digital completed its SanDisk separation in February 2025). Computers is consolidation by restructuring and reshoring — Hewlett-Packard split into HP Inc. and HPE, Dell bought EMC, hyperscalers increasingly buy "white-box" servers direct from contract manufacturers, and AI-server assembly is being brought onto U.S. soil (Foxconn, Quanta, Wistron, Pegatron, Inventec plants in Texas, Wisconsin, and California). Peripherals is consolidation by survival and scale — the NCR split into Voyix and Atleos, Diebold's merger and Chapter 11 round trip, Xerox's Lexmark acquisition in July 2025, and now Brink's pending ~$6.6 billion purchase of NCR Atleos, approved by both shareholder bases in June 2026 [1]. Expect further vertical moves — into software, services, cooling, power, and supply — more than simple horizontal mergers.

The rollup point the children make only separately: they are moving in opposite directions on domestic manufacturing itself. The computer child is pulling final assembly onshore; the peripheral child is pushing it out (NCR Voyix completed the transfer of its self-checkout and POS hardware manufacturing to an outsourced model in March 2026); and the storage child builds essentially no new drive plants anywhere, putting capital into chip fabs and software [1]. Because the federal statistics in Section 3 count only domestic assembly, these three trajectories — not the demand cycle — are what will move this level's measured size over the next several years.

One further rollup nuance worth keeping: at this level the published HHI is 706.8 and CR4 only 43.9%, which reads as "unconcentrated" — yet each six-digit child is an oligopoly (computers CR4 60.5%, storage CR4 83.6%, and even the fragmented peripherals child reaches ~89% by its top 50). The whole looks less concentrated than its parts because the three children are dominated by different firms, so pooling them dilutes any single company's share [1][3].

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9. Risks

The risks are 33411's, inherited whole [1]:

• AI-capex "digestion" risk (two of three children). Roughly 83% of the level's receipts ride on a handful of hyperscalers spending unprecedented, increasingly debt-funded sums; a pause hits fast.
• Memory-cost inflation, which cuts both ways within the level. The shortage that hands storage pricing power is a direct cost shock to computers and peripherals — DRAM and SSD prices are projected up ~130% by the end of 2026, with a forecast ~10% drop in PC shipments. Viewed at the level this is a transfer between children, not a uniform headwind.
• Cyclicality and commoditization (the whole level). These are boom-bust, thin-margin, substitutable-product businesses; a maker that loses its cost, scale, or platform edge has little to fall back on.
• Customer and supply-chain concentration. Server and drive makers depend on a few cloud giants (cloud is 88% of Western Digital's revenue) that can also bypass the brand via ODM-direct buying, and on Taiwan-centered chips and Southeast-Asian assembly.
• Trade and export-control whiplash. Sudden tariff or licensing changes can strand inventory or reroute production overnight, with the $300 million Seagate settlement as the concrete precedent.
• Fixed-cost and balance-sheet risk. Heavy fixed obligations persist through downturns in storage, and commoditized hardware plus leverage produced Diebold's bankruptcy in peripherals.
• Technology substitution and secular decline. Flash could erode hard drives' cost edge; office print volume and cash usage are structurally falling — a headwind unique to the smallest child.

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10. How to invest, and the outlook

Because 3341 equals 33411, the investment approach is identical: match the child to the thesis — the level is not one trade. Direct AI-hardware torque comes from the computer child's server names (DELL, HPE, SMCI), at the cost of thin and currently compressing margins; a rare pricing-power window — the one place in the level where the AI wave is expanding margins — comes from the storage child's drive makers (STX, WDC), with MU and SNDK adding more cyclical memory exposure; quality and recurring revenue from IBM, Apple, and the storage-systems names (NTAP, PSTG); and the mature, cash-generative corner from peripherals (ZBRA, HPQ, LOGI, VYX). Several names — HP, Dell, HPE, IBM — span more than one child in a single ticker. There is no dedicated fund; passive investors get the level bundled inside broad technology-hardware and semiconductor funds, which also fold in the Nvidia-style chip layer that captures the fattest margins but sits outside 3341 [1].

A caution on comparing numbers across this family, carried up because it applies to every figure above: Census figures measure domestic establishments by primary production activity; company filings consolidate worldwide operations, most of them offshore; analyst share estimates measure global units or capacity. Those are three different universes and should not be combined into a single "market size" [1].

Near-term outlook. The base case is strong dollar demand for two of the three children — hyperscaler capital spending guided sharply higher into 2026, hard drives effectively sold out through the year with pricing power projected into 2027 — while peripherals stays cyclical and, in printing and cash, secularly soft [1]. The through-line for the whole level is that value keeps migrating out of the metal and into mix, proprietary platforms, and attached software, services, and consumables. The watch-items now run in different directions rather than in parallel: whether GPU-heavy revenue and memory costs keep compressing computer margins even as shipments grow, whether three-maker capital discipline holds in storage, and whether recurring revenue in peripherals outruns the decline in print and cash. For the complete company-by-company map, per-child economics, and the full risk and regulatory detail, see the 33411 primer, of which this level is a one-to-one rollup.

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Sources

Figures for the level (NAICS 3341) are our ingested federal ground truth; company-level and industry-color figures are synthesized from the Histometrics 33411 child primer and the underlying sources it cites. Because 3341 contains only 33411, the two levels share the same figures.

1. Histometrics primer, 33411 Computer and Peripheral Equipment Manufacturing (2026) — and its three child primers (334111 Electronic Computer Manufacturing; 334112 Computer Storage Device Manufacturing; 334118 Computer Terminal and Other Computer Peripheral Equipment Manufacturing) and their cited sources (Apple FY2025 results; Dell FY2026, HP FY2025, HPE FY2025, Super Micro FY2025 and IBM FY2025 Form 10-Ks; Seagate, Western Digital, SanDisk and Quantum FY2025 filings; Zebra, Logitech, NCR Atleos, NCR Voyix, Diebold Nixdorf and Corsair results; Xerox/Lexmark and Brink's–NCR Atleos transaction filings; Gartner PC and memory-price forecasts; TrendForce, IDC and Coughlin share data; hyperscaler-capex estimates; BIS export-control actions and the Seagate settlement; Micron CHIPS Act award; Census AIES 2023, M3 shipments and FT900 import data; CRS export-control and tariff analysis).
2. U.S. Census Bureau, County Business Patterns (CBP) 2023 — NAICS 3341. Establishments (557), employment (31,508), annual payroll ($3.84B), and the six-digit splits. https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cbp.html
3. U.S. Census Bureau, 2022 Economic Census — Concentration by Largest Firms, NAICS 3341. Firms (384), receipts ($19.84B), CR4 43.9% / CR8 58.6% / CR20 78.0% / CR50 89.2%, HHI 706.8. https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/economic-census.html
4. Apple Inc., Q4 FY2025 Results (Form 8-K) (2025). Mac segment revenue (~$33.7B). https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/10/apple-reports-fourth-quarter-results/
5. U.S. Small Business Administration, Table of Small Business Size Standards (2023). Employee-based thresholds used for the small-business shares of the six-digit children. https://www.sba.gov/document/support-table-size-standards