Manufacturing companies in Charlotte: industrial headquarters downtown, plants in the ring counties

This report is for buyers and engineers sourcing in the Charlotte region, job seekers and analysts, and B2B sellers who want to know which Charlotte manufacturers are offices and which are plants. It gives the Census count and county split, what the plants make, the public manufacturers headquartered here, sources for the private ones, and a prospecting plan.

The count

The US Census Bureau's County Business Patterns (CBP) for the Charlotte-Concord-Gastonia, NC-SC metro area (CBSA 16740), all manufacturing (NAICS 31 to 33):

Ranking the CBP metro file ourselves, Charlotte is 20th among metro areas by manufacturing establishments and 18th by manufacturing employees. Manufacturing is 8.9% of the jobs CBP counts in the metro, in line with the national 8.8%.

The unit counted is the establishment, one location with paid employees, as of the week of March 12, 2023. A headquarters in Uptown is classed as a management office, not a plant, which is why Charlotte's long list of industrial head offices barely moves the manufacturing count. Owner-only shops aren't included.

Eleven counties, two states

Per-plant and pay figures are our calculation from the CBP county file. Mecklenburg has a third of the plants but they're smaller; Gaston, Union and Rowan average about 60 employees, and Chester County's 43 plants average 84. The three South Carolina counties hold 325 plants (14% of the metro) and fall under South Carolina's tax and incentive rules, which matters for site decisions.

What the metro makes

The detailed codes show the supply chain: 61 plastics product plants employ 4,215 people, 19 motor vehicle parts plants 3,429, 172 machine shops 1,637 and seven steel mills 1,914, alongside 60 breweries and nine pharmaceutical plants (1,261 employees). Machinery plants pay the most of the big groups, $83,047 on average by our calculation.

Size

Grouped: 1,486 plants with 1 to 19 employees (737 with 1 to 4, 403 with 5 to 9, 346 with 10 to 19), 618 with 20 to 99 (374 and 244), and 237 with 100 or more (148 with 100 to 249, 58 with 250 to 499, 23 with 500 to 999 and 8 with 1,000 or more).

Public manufacturers headquartered in the Charlotte area

In SEC EDGAR, 22 companies with a listed ticker and a manufacturing SIC code (2000 to 3999) give a business address in the metro. The 15 largest, each checked against the cover page and income statement of its latest Form 10-K:

Two notes from checking the filings. 3D Systems, whose 10-K gives its headquarters as Rock Hill, South Carolina, isn't counted because EDGAR codes it as a software company. And DDC Enterprise, which EDGAR places in Charlotte, gives New York as its principal executive office in its annual report, so we left it out. For the full list of North Carolina manufacturers, see the North Carolina manufacturing report.

Finding private manufacturers by name

• York County, S.C. York County Economic Development publishes a largest-manufacturers list for the county, headed by Schaeffler in Fort Mill and including Cummins-Meritor, New-Indy Containerboard and Atlas Copco. The page gives no date for its employee counts, so treat them as indicative.
• North Carolina counties. NC Commerce's Largest Employers tool names the biggest employers in Mecklenburg, Gaston, Iredell and every other North Carolina county.
• Regional development. The Charlotte Regional Business Alliance markets the 3.2-million-person region to companies looking to move or expand there.
• MEP centers. NCMEP covers the North Carolina counties and lists UNC Charlotte's Industrial Solutions Lab among its partners; SCMEP covers York, Lancaster and Chester.

Both North and South Carolina run their own OSHA state plans for private employers, so a plant's safety record comes from the state agency. Both states' inspections appear in OSHA's Establishment Search.

Prospecting Charlotte-area manufacturers

Don't confuse the two halves. A Ballantyne head office can approve an enterprise contract, but the plant in Gastonia decides whether a maintenance service or a new machine gets tried.

Worked example: a robotics integrator

Illustrative example. Catawba Cell Robotics is fictional, as are its rates; the plant counts are from the Census Bureau.

Catawba Cell Robotics (catawbacell.example) designs robotic welding and machine-tending cells for plants with 50 to 249 employees.

• Charlotte-area plants with 50 to 249 employees: 244 + 148 = 392.
• Fabricated metal, machinery, plastics and rubber and transportation equipment are 480 + 183 + 127 + 116 = 906 of the metro's 2,341 plants (39%), so about 150 fit on size and subsector.
• Catawba starts with Gaston, Union, Rowan and Iredell, which hold 942 of the metro's plants (40%): about 60 accounts.
• At one design study per eight accounts, that's seven or eight studies from the first pass.

The research is spotting plants with a labor or capacity problem now: a second shift they can't staff, a new customer program, a welding hiring push. Bebop can search for "metal and plastics plants in Gaston, Union, Rowan and Iredell counties with 50 to 249 employees hiring welders or machine operators" and write a playbook for each.

Subject: The welding openings at [Company] [town]

Hi [first name],

I noticed [Company] has had welder openings posted at the [town] plant for a while. When a second shift can't be staffed, a single robotic cell on the highest-volume part often covers the gap.

We build welding and machine-tending cells for plants in Gaston, Union and Rowan counties and can show you one running nearby. Would a 30-minute walk of your weld area be worth it?

[Your name], Catawba Cell Robotics

For the region's largest companies in every industry, see largest companies in Charlotte.

Next step: for how plants and head offices split buying decisions, read the manufacturing industry guide.