This report is an update from the previous year’s Manufacturing Market Data (MD-MMD-101). Key yearly updates on global manufacturing market size to note are 2020 data for Germany, China, and the United States, and 2020/2021 World Bank data for manufacturing value add.
For better alignment with the colloquially-used industry groupings in industrial and manufacturing markets (i.e., automotive versus transportation), ABI Research normalized the country codes for China, the United States, Japan, and the European Union (EU) as follows:
The specific breakdown is available in the “Industry Codes Index” worksheet. This shows the 430 component codes that have been included with the 20 above. For example, ABI111 (Plastic & Rubber Manufacturing) includes the U.S. codes 3261 (Plastics Product Manufacturing) and 3262 (Rubber Product Manufacturing).
The global manufacturing value added market size was US$16.4 trillion in 2021.
The top producing regions driving the global manufacturing market size are China, the United States, Japan, and Germany (in that order), cumulatively representing over half of the world’s manufacturing value add at 58%. The automotive market is the total largest manufacturing industry by revenue across the “big four” (China, the United States, Japan, and Germany), representing 11.5% of all revenue. It is the largest industry in both Germany and Japan; however, in the United States, it is second to food manufacturing, and in China, it is the fourth largest in size, after computer and electronics, primary metal, and machinery manufacturing. Automotive manufacturing also boasts the largest factories by size, with 9 of the top 10 largest factories being in the automotive industry, with the Volkswagen Wolfsburg Plant spanning an enormous 6.58 Square Kilometers (km2).
Process manufacturing is larger than discrete manufacturing in both China and the United States, US$6,609,200,050,000 and US$2,865,182,193,000 to US$6,505,321,180,000 and US$2,209,668,459,000, respectively. In Japan and Germany, discrete manufacturing was the larger market, US$1,905,735,654,000 and US$1,074,770,225,525 to US$1,562,439,999,865 and US$723,235,911,381[CJH1] , respectively.
The scale and efficiency of the “big four” markets is interesting to evaluate in the context of the global manufacturing market size. While China remains around 2.5X larger than the United States in terms of manufacturing revenue, it employs 6X as many individuals. This would serve to show a significant efficiency advantage for the United States in the way in which its manufacturing manpower is deployed. Along a similar vein regarding enterprise efficiency, the data also show that Japan, while having 20,142 fewer overall enterprises than Germany, has manufacturing revenue 1.7X larger. This would indicate that the value scale of Japanese manufacturing firms nearly doubles that of Germany on average.
The size of companies in these four key manufacturing nations highlights the ever-growing importance of technology and digital innovation in the global manufacturing market size. While smaller companies do benefit from digital technologies, larger companies experience far greater scaling of efficiencies from digital twins, the cloud, simulation software, 5G, and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). In China, for example, large enterprises (with more than 250 employees) make up only 2% of enterprises, but are responsible for 42% of production value. In the United States, just over 2,000 of the largest manufacturers now employ over 50% of the manufacturing workforce.
Some other key industry figures to note:
ABI Research has developed this market data (MD) to empower clients to observe the latest manufacturing macro trends across regions and industries in the context of the global manufacturing market size. It establishes foundational data to reference for internal and external market sizing and analyses with confidence that the data are the latest available from primary sources, in a central location. These data also show the bounds of what is possible in a range of areas (number of establishments, factory space, productivity, output), plus which industries and organizations lead versus lag behind.
- Number of enterprises per industry
- Number of factories per industry
- Output per industry
- Employees per industry
- Value added per industry
Data surrounding the global manufacturing market size were generated through secondary research from governmental databases, including the Census, Labor Force Survey, and statistics bureaus. Monetary data from data sources were expressed in the respective domestic currency of each region, which is converted to U.S. dollars using the average exchange rate for the respective year.
