NAICS 33611Industry · 5-digitinternational market

Automobile and light-duty motor vehicle manufacturing

SoftwarePLM — Product Lifecycle Management for Discrete Manufacturers 336

This industry comprises establishments primarily engaged in manufacturing light-duty vehicles and their chassis, for highway use. The manufacture of electric cars for highway use is included. — Statistics Canada, NAICS 2022A

Establishments · CanadaA: 34
Under 10 employeesA: 59%
Establishments · USA: 262
Employment · USA: 233,453
Payroll · USA: $24.4B

Size and shape

How many businesses there are and how small they are. Fragmentation is the first thing an entrant — or anyone selling software into this industry — needs to know, and it is one of the few things that is actually measured.

Canadian establishments by number of employeesA

1–41441%

5–9618%

10–1926%

20–4926%

50–990—

100–19926%

200–4990—

500+824%

Of 34 Canadian establishments with employees, 59% have fewer than ten — mostly small operators.

Where they areA

Ontario2574%

British Columbia412%

Quebec39%

Nova Scotia13%

Largest four provinces by establishment count. Establishments with employees only — sole operators with no payroll are not in this table, so in trades and personal services the true number of businesses is higher.

How many new establishments are still tradingA

Manufacturing, US · opened 2020

86.2%

1 year

70.8%

3 years

58.4%

5 years

45.3%

10 years

opened 2015

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.

How businesses here compete

The structural profile of subsector 336, which every industry beneath it inherits. This is analyst judgment from how the subsector is organised — not research into this industry, and not a measurement.

international competitionhigh capitalUNVERIFIEDinherited from 336 Transportation equipment manufacturing

A tiered supply chain in which price is dictated downward. The reachable ends are specialty vehicles, trailers, truck bodies and aftermarket.

Who sets the price: A few OEMs, through tiered supply contracts.
The software it runs on: Automotive and aerospace quality systems, supplier portals, product lifecycle management.

Market screens and studies

Market-entry records filed along this branch of the hierarchy. A record at or beneath this code is about this industry; one above it is about something wider that contains it.

Screened one level up. Nothing is filed at this exact code; the screen for 3361 Motor vehicle manufacturing covers it.

Operating businessScreenedfiled at 3361

Electric Bus & Truck Assembly PlantStructure decides

binding constraint: capital intensity

Nobody screens a new light-vehicle assembly plant: the twelve Canadian establishments with 500-plus employees are the transplants of global automakers, and US County Business Patterns puts the average establishment in this group at roughly 750 people. The enterable-looking end is the one the electric transition seemed to open — a purpose-built electric school bus and medium-duty truck maker, selling into subsidised fleet programmes. Canada ran that experiment in public. Lion Electric of Saint-Jérôme delivered 852 vehicles in fiscal 2023 for $253.5M of revenue — and a gross loss of $5.5M and a net loss of $103.8M [A]. It had put $148.0M in 2022 and $72.2M in 2023 into its Joliet, Illinois plant and its Mirabel battery campus, plus $79.1M and $67.2M into vehicle and battery development [A], against an order book it valued at about $500M — an order book that, by its own definition, included vehicles for which subsidy applications had merely been filed [A]. In December 2024 it entered creditor protection owing more than $244M; a Quebec investor group bought what remained in May 2025, and the Joliet and Mirabel sites were shut [B]. The mechanism is the cut. Plant, tooling, certification and a service network are sunk years before volume arrives, and the volume is released by government funding rounds, not by the buyer's own budget — so the entrant carries automotive fixed costs at a few hundred units a year. Truck Body & Trailer Manufacturing (3362) is cut on the same factor for a cyclical reason; here the fixed cost was never covered even at the top of the order book. Upfitting and specialty conversion on a bought chassis is the reachable adjacency and sits in 3362, not here.

NAICS 33615 vendors named11 sourced figuresOpen →

Software serving this industry

The vertical software markets filed along the same branch — who sells to these businesses and who they would have to displace — and then the generic categories every business buys whatever it does.

Sold across the wider branch

Cross-industry softwareScreenedfiled at 336 Transportation equipment manufacturing

PLM — Product Lifecycle Management for Discrete ManufacturersOne thing must be true

binding constraint: incumbent vulnerability

Incumbent Siemens (Teamcenter), Dassault Systèmes (ENOVIA / 3DEXPERIENCE) and PTC (Windchill) — an oligopoly of three, with Autodesk, Aras, Oracle and SAP behind

PLM is the manufacturer's record of what the product is. It holds the bill of materials, the change orders (ECR/ECO/ECN) that moved it, the CAD vault (PDM), requirements, quality and compliance records, and the supplier view of all of it. ERP, MES and service all read from it, which is why the incumbents are hard to dislodge. Three vendors hold the enterprise tier and all three are growing. PTC's PLM product group earned $1,639.0M in FY2025, up from $1,333.4M, and 95% of PTC's revenue is recurring [A]. Dassault Systèmes' Industrial Innovation software, the line that holds ENOVIA beside CATIA and SIMULIA, rose 6% at constant currency to €3,134.5M [A]. Siemens says its PLM business mainly drove Digital Industries software to €1,900M in its fiscal fourth quarter alone, up 14% [A]. Siemens has also spent about $10B in enterprise value on Altair [A]. None of the three is weak. Below the enterprise tier, newcomers keep getting bought: Arena went to PTC for about $715M [A], Onshape to PTC [C], Toronto's Upchain to Autodesk in 2021 [B], and Duro to Altium, a Renesas subsidiary, in December 2025 [C]. A cloud PLM for small hardware teams can be built, but so far it has ended in a sale to one of the incumbents, not as an independent company. Incumbent vulnerability decides it. The opening is beside the system of record, not a replacement for it. CoLab of St. John's raised C$28.6M for design review that plugs into Windchill, Teamcenter and 3DEXPERIENCE [B]. How this differs from the neighbours: the 334410 record covers EDA for chip and board design, and the 315 record covers apparel PLM (Centric, FlexPLM, Lectra). This record covers mechanical and mechatronic PLM across automotive, aerospace, machinery, medical devices and consumer products. The 336 code is a navigation anchor only. PLM began in transportation equipment, but its buyers span all of discrete manufacturing.

NAICS 33610 vendors named8 sourced figuresOpen →

Catalogued categories — named, not analysed

Discrete manufacturing ERP SaaS 31-33

And what every business buys · 33 generic categories

Sold to every industry rather than this one, so they are filed against the software industry's own code. The same few vendors recur across most of them.

Who works here

The occupations employed in Manufacturing, most concentrated in it first. The share is measured against the whole sector, not this industry — the published cross-tabulation stops there.

Concentrated in this sectorA

Aircraft assemblers and aircraft assembly inspectors One industry 91.3%

Supervisors, assembly and fabrication One industry 88.3%

Machine operators and related workers in pulp and paper production and wood processing and manufacturing One industry 86.1%

Managers in manufacturing and utilities One industry 84.4%

Machine operators and related workers in chemical, plastic and rubber processing One industry 82.7%

Mechanical, electrical and electronics assemblers and inspectors One industry 82.3%

Machine operators and related workers in food, beverage and associated products processing One industry 79.1%

Machine operators and related workers in mineral and metal products processing and manufacturing One industry 77.7%

Furniture, wood, plastic and other products assemblers, finishers and inspectors One industry 73.9%

Machine operators and related workers in textile, fabric, fur and leather products processing and manufacturing One industry 70.8%

These jobs are mostly done here. An operator in this industry is competing for them against others in the same industry, not against the whole economy.

And the jobs every business has

Other technical trades Across the economy 20%

Technical occupations in electronics and electrical engineering Across the economy 16.3%

Shoe repairers, shoemakers and upholsterers Across the economy 15.2%

Administrative and financial supervisors Across the economy 11.6%

Technical inspectors and regulatory officers Across the economy 10.7%

Administrative services managers Across the economy 9.6%

Legislative and senior managers Across the economy 9.2%

Building maintenance installers, servicers and repairers Across the economy 8.3%

Financial, insurance and related administrative support workers Across the economy 7.7%

Technical occupations in computer and information systems Across the economy 4.8%

Found across at least fourteen of the twenty sectors. In a small establishment several of these are usually one person, or an outside provider.

All 162 occupations →

Inside this industry

1 row sits directly beneath 33611. Each has a base report of its own.

Code	Industry	Establishments · CA	What is known
336110	Automobile and light-duty motor vehicle manufacturing	34	screened at 3361

Alongside it, under 3361 Motor vehicle manufacturing

Code	Industry	Establishments · CA	What is known
33612	Heavy-duty truck manufacturing	35	screened at 3361