Manufacturing
Manufacturing: the branch that transforms, concentrated where there is a port, pulp, salmon or food, and with a geography that moves little from one year to the next.
Maps exactly onto CIIU Rev. 4 section C.
Territorial distribution
341/346 communesShaded by how much of each commune's own formal payroll this sector is — not by headcount, which would draw the same map of where people live for every sector.
Counted at the firm's registered address, not the workplace. SII assigns a company's whole payroll to the commune of its tax domicile, so a head office in Santiago carries the shifts worked everywhere else. Read this as where the sector files, and the count below as where its workers live.
Communes with at least 200 workers in the sector, so a village with one firm does not top the list.
What the branch is made of
69 divisions · 172 activitiesA section of twenty-one parts says what this page is called. The register files firms two levels below it, and those parts are not one economy: elaboración de otros productos alimenticios and fabricación de artículos de piel share a letter and little else. Each division has a page of its own.
- Elaboración de otros productos alimenticios 146,085
- Reparación de productos elaborados de metal, maquinaria y equipo 78,398
- Fabricación de productos metálicos para uso estructural, tanques, depósitos, recipientes de metal 63,545
- Fabricación de otros productos elaborados de metal; actividades de servicios de trabajo de metales 38,085
- Elaboración y conservación de carne 33,000
- Elaboración de bebidas alcohólicas y no alcohólicas 28,103
- Fabricación de papel y de productos de papel 24,209
- Fabricación de productos de plástico 23,204
- Elaboración y conservación de pescado, crustáceos y moluscos 23,159
- Fabricación de otros productos químicos 22,956
- Elaboración de productos lácteos 21,053
- Fabricación de productos de madera, corcho, paja y materiales trenzables 20,334
- Aserrado y acepilladura de madera 19,261
- Fabricación de productos minerales no metálicos n.c.p. 18,880
- Elaboración y conservación de frutas, legumbres y hortalizas 18,733
- Fabricación de muebles 17,689
- Impresión y actividades de servicios relacionadas con la impresión 15,950
The list stops where 17 divisions have accounted for 81% of the branch's employment. The other 52 are together 19.3% of it and are drawn above, each as its own tile: every division of the register.
Two ways to count the jobs
SII 2024 · Casen 2024Series 2005–2024
2005–2024Who the sector runs on
SII 2024Artificial intelligence
estimate · 2026-05By region
| Region | Workers | Of the sector | Of its own payroll | Living here | Firms | Since 2005 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Metropolitana | 434,233 | 57.2% | 7.5% | 367,541 | 46,343 | +1% |
| Biobío | 65,623 | 8.6% | 11.8% | 61,687 | 9,625 | +33% |
| Valparaíso | 54,432 | 7.2% | 8.1% | 42,648 | 10,704 | +28% |
| Los Lagos | 34,723 | 4.6% | 9.4% | 33,239 | 7,057 | +46% |
| Maule | 34,031 | 4.5% | 7.1% | 36,149 | 6,868 | +31% |
| O'Higgins | 28,485 | 3.8% | 6.5% | 37,488 | 6,436 | +52% |
| Antofagasta | 26,717 | 3.5% | 11.6% | 20,045 | 3,565 | +130% |
| Araucanía | 19,336 | 2.5% | 6.3% | 20,636 | 6,778 | +32% |
| Atacama | 11,193 | 1.5% | 12.1% | 4,994 | 1,653 | +92% |
| Ñuble | 11,129 | 1.5% | 7.2% | 14,812 | 2,767 | +37% |
| Coquimbo | 10,844 | 1.4% | 4.8% | 11,560 | 4,129 | +38% |
| Los Ríos | 9,860 | 1.3% | 9.2% | 12,314 | 3,031 | +22% |
| Magallanes | 7,288 | 1.0% | 9.3% | 4,815 | 1,487 | +9% |
| Tarapacá | 6,466 | 0.9% | 5.8% | 6,388 | 1,807 | +11% |
| Arica y Parinacota | 3,437 | 0.5% | 6.3% | 3,815 | 1,043 | −32% |
| Aysén | 964 | 0.1% | 2.7% | 1,446 | 1,053 | −5% |
"Workers" is SII's count at the firm's registered address; "living here" is Casen's count of employees of this branch who live in the region. They are different measurements of different things and the columns are read side by side, not subtracted. A dash is a cell with fewer than 30 sampled workers.