September 29, 2025

Hi everyone, my name is Taylor St. Germain with ITR Economics. Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of TrendsTalk. We at ITR are you’re apolitical and unbiased source of economic intelligence, and today I wanted to discuss manufacturing.

Generally good news on the manufacturing front. When we look at our overall manufacturing benchmark, the 12/12 growth rate has not only turned positive, but is rising at an accelerating pace. This is a welcome sign after that growth rate was essentially negative for most all of 2024 and even into early 2025. But hey, that growth rate has improved. We’re seeing accelerating growth and we expect this accelerating growth to continue. Now that’s not to say that every manufacturing vertical market or subsegment is positive. There are clear areas of growth, areas of opportunity.

And I would head over to our ITR Trends Report to reference some of the numbers that I’ll share with you, but we put together what we call our manufacturing economy at-a-glance. It’s really a dashboard that highlights all the different vertical markets within manufacturing. So despite the overall index for manufacturing coming in positive, there are still a number of industries that are below the year ago level today. So I’ll highlight a few of those industries. The Heavy-Duty Truck Production market is down about 19.4%. That’s a minus 19.4% growth rate. We have Medical Equipment and Supplies down 5%. Mining, which excludes oil and gas, is down about 0.1%. Then the last segment I’d call out is the automotive space, North America Light Vehicle Production, which is also down minus 2.1%.

So again, despite the overall index being positive, there are a number of subsegments that we’re still seeing some negativity in. But if you look at even those segments, as we progress deeper into 2025, we do expect those segments to enter the recovery phase of the cycle. And every segment that I just mentioned to you, other than our mining, mineral mining, is expected to be positive in 2026. And I think that’s a key point here, which is as I talk to folks, I know there’s still some pessimism out there. You know, like I mentioned, if you’re in any of those different vertical markets that are still negative today, you might not feel as optimistic as the rest of the economy feels. But I still hope you’re looking ahead to growth. Because again, one of our biggest concerns is not will we grow in 2026, it’s will you be able to keep up with that growth? So even for some of you folks that are feeling some of the negativity, I expect a lot of that negativity to disappear.

If you look at our Manufacturing at-a-glance in our Trends Report, there is only one manufacturing vertical market that we forecast regularly that is negative in 2026. And that is the mineral mining space, which the reality of that space is it’s a shrinking industry. But we’ve got positive growth rates in food, in aircraft, in oil and gas, in computers and electronics, in machinery orders, all in 2026. Not to mention the defense industry and the construction machinery market showing some pretty attractive growth rates. So we’re seeing the manufacturing data continue to improve.

For some of you, that means less negative, which I know is a little bit less exciting. For some of you, that means positive growth. But as we continue into 2026, we see more and more growth coming our way. So I hope you’re preparing for growth. It’s a welcoming sign for our manufacturers who had a very tough 2024, but that growth is here and there’s even more on the horizon.

Hope you found this information helpful. My name is Taylor St. Germain with ITR Economics. Thanks for listening to TrendsTalk. Please remember to like and subscribe to TrendsTalk wherever you listen to your podcasts. And look forward to seeing you all in the next one. Thanks so much. Take care for now.