Medical equipment and supplies manufacturing
This industry comprises establishments primarily engaged in manufacturing medical equipment and supplies. Establishments primarily engaged in grinding eyeglasses and hard contact lenses to prescription, on a factory basis, are included. — Statistics Canada, NAICS 2022A
- Establishments · CanadaA
- 1,410
- Under 10 employeesA
- 69%
- Establishments · USA
- 9,009
- Employment · USA
- 304,707
- Payroll · USA
- $24.6B
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
Of 1,410 Canadian establishments with employees, 69% have fewer than ten — mostly small operators.
Where they areA
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.
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 339, 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.
A residual holding unlike businesses — medical devices, dental labs, signs, jewellery, sporting goods. Each needs reading on its own.
- Who sets the price
- Varies by niche — dental labs take the dentist's price, medical devices a regulated one.
- The software it runs on
- Niche-specific: dental lab management, quality systems for devices.
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 3391 Medical equipment and supplies manufacturing covers it.
Two forces have taken the middle of this trade at once: chairside milling moved single-unit crowns into the dentist's own office, and digital scanning made it trivial to send the rest of the case to a large offshore lab overnight. What survives is complex removable and implant work at the top and price competition at the bottom. The dental practices this lab would serve are themselves consolidating — see the practice-acquisition record at 621210 — and consolidated groups negotiate lab pricing centrally. The offshore lab in that sentence is now a listed company, and it publishes. Modern Dental Group produces in Mainland China, Thailand and Vietnam and sells into Europe, North America and Australia: HK$3,736.5M of 2025 revenue at a 55.8% gross margin, HK$696.4M of it earned in North America, on about 1,039,000 digital-solution cases, up 32.7% in the year [A]. That margin is what a low-cost production base buys, and it is the margin a domestic lab is asked to price against on the same crown. The firms taking the other end of the case are no smaller — Dentsply Sirona turned $3,680.0M in 2025, Envista $2,719.5M and Align $4,035.0M [A] — and each of them is selling the dentist a reason to keep the work in the operatory. What is left is complex removable and implant work that neither travels well nor mills chairside: a real trade, but a much smaller one than the 1,410 Canadian establishments in this code would suggest.
The regulated end of this market belongs to a company that already owns the rest of the customer's validated software, and it is still growing at 21%. Veeva's FY2026 10-K (year ended 2026-01-31) puts R&D and Quality Solutions subscription revenue at $1,426.6M, up from $1,179.8M, inside total revenue of $3,195.3M, and describes Veeva Quality Cloud — Veeva QMS, Quality Docs, lab and training — as one of four product categories sold to pharma, biotech and MedTech [A]. It names Honeywell, Dassault Systèmes, OpenText, Oracle and IQVIA as the vendors it meets in quality [A]. The other scaled independents have all been priced and absorbed. Honeywell paid $1.3B in cash for Sparta Systems (TrackWise) in a deal announced 2020-12-22, when Sparta claimed 42 of the top 50 pharma firms [B]. Hexagon bought ETQ (founded 1992, 185 staff) in 2022, and ETQ's product now ships as Octave Reliance from Octave Intelligence plc (Nasdaq: OCTV), the Hexagon spin-off that began filing with the SEC in 2026 and does not break Reliance out of $784.9M of first-half revenue [A]. Hg took Ideagen private for £1.1bn in July 2022 [B]; Fortive owns Intelex and PTC owns Arena (both covered on neighbouring records). MasterControl took its first outside money only in December 2022 — $150M led by Sixth Street Growth at a $1.3B valuation, after passing $100M of ARR [B]. Below them, the small-company tier is already funded several times over: Greenlight Guru (more than $120M from JMI Equity, 2021) for medical devices, Qualio ($50M Series B led by Tiger Global, 2021), Dot Compliance ($33M total by its 2022 Series B) and ComplianceQuest ($36M Series A led by Insight Partners, 2019, built on Salesforce) [B]. Lock-in is unusually strong: an eQMS is itself a validated system under 21 CFR Part 11 and ISO 13485, so switching means re-validating, migrating controlled documents with their audit trails, and defending the change to an FDA or notified-body auditor. That protects whoever is installed, and it protects the incumbents more than it opens a door. Incumbent vulnerability decides it — none of the incumbents is weak, the PE owners have already paid for the category, and the open small-company segment is crowded with funded vendors. How this differs from its neighbours: EHS software (541620) manages worker safety, emissions and permits, not product quality — Intelex and Cority sell both, which is why they appear here only as a row. GRC (541514) is enterprise risk, IT-control and audit evidence for SOC 2 and the like. PLM (336) is the design record and bill of materials; Arena straddles the line by selling QMS alongside PLM. MES (333) runs the shop floor — Siemens Opcenter Quality and SAP QM are quality modules inside those suites. The NAICS anchor 3391 (medical equipment and supplies) is where the regulatory pull is strongest; the same buyers sit in 3254 (pharmaceuticals), 336 (transportation equipment, under IATF 16949), 333 (machinery) and 3345 (instruments).
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
Catalogued categories — named, not analysed
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
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
Found across at least fourteen of the twenty sectors. In a small establishment several of these are usually one person, or an outside provider.
Inside this industry
1 row sits directly beneath 33911. Each has a base report of its own.
| Code | Industry | Establishments · CA | What is known |
|---|---|---|---|
| 339110 | Medical equipment and supplies manufacturing | 1,410 | screened at 3391 |