AI Analysis: Real manufacturing sales, orders, inventory owned and inventory to sales ratio, 2017 dollars, seasonally adjusted

Executive Summary

Statistics Canada's Table 16100013 provides 24 years of monthly real manufacturing data (January 2002–January 2026) across 31 NAICS industries and 8 key metrics, totalling 29,336 records expressed in constant 2017 dollars. The dataset reveals a strongly right-skewed distribution — with an overall mean of $14,381M versus a median of $3,485M — shaped by large aggregate categories like Total Inventories ($53,129M average) and Unfilled Orders ($49,871M average). Four major economic disruptions are clearly visible in the data: the 2008–2009 financial crisis, the COVID-19 shock of 2020, the post-COVID rebound, and the 2021–2022 supply chain crisis.

Key Findings

• The dataset spans 289 monthly periods from January 2002 to January 2026, covering 31 NAICS industry categories across 8 distinct manufacturing metrics, with 29,336 total records.
• The overall value distribution is strongly right-skewed, with a mean of $14,381M far exceeding the median of $3,485M and a standard deviation of $21,064M, driven by high-value aggregate categories.
• Unfilled Orders is the most volatile metric, ranging from $1,825M to $103,800M with a mean of ~$49,871M, while the Inventory-to-Sales Ratio is the most stable, averaging just 1.48 with a narrow range of 1.02–3.61.
• The COVID-19 shock (March–May 2020) produced the sharpest short-term outliers in the dataset, followed by an unusually rapid post-COVID rebound in late 2020–2021 that itself generated high-end statistical anomalies.
• Supply chain disruptions in 2021–2022 drove Unfilled Orders to historically elevated levels, representing one of the most sustained anomaly periods outside of the 2008–2009 financial crisis.
• Sales of Goods Manufactured accounts for the largest share of records (8,951 out of ~15,017 filtered records), suggesting broader industry sub-category coverage compared to other metrics which average ~867 records each.
• Among inventory sub-components, Raw Materials is the largest (average ~$22,644M) and Finished Goods is the smallest (average ~$17,129M), while inventory measures as a group show very strong positive correlations with each other over the full 2002–2026 period.