Fewer Than Half of Wisconsin Manufacturers Believe Business Climate is Headed in the Right Direction

Thursday, March 6th, 2025 -- 11:01 AM

(Joe Schulz, Wisconsin Public Radio) Fewer than half of Wisconsin manufacturers believe the business climate is headed in the right direction, highlighting an underlying sense of uncertainty around the economy, according to a new report.

According to Joe Schulz with the Wisconsin Public Radio, the Wisconsin Center for Manufacturing and Productivity, a public-private partnership that provides resources to manufacturers, released its fourth annual Wisconsin Manufacturing Report Monday.

The report provides insight into how manufacturers view the wider economy, the labor market and areas of future investment. Its findings are based on a survey of more than 400 manufacturers and a series of focus groups with industry executives from around the state.

The surveys were completed in the summer of 2024 and the focus groups were held that fall. Only 47 percent of manufacturers said the business climate is headed in the right direction, down from 51 percent in 2023 and 50 percent in 2022, according to the report.

It’s the first time the share of businesses saying the economy is headed in the right direction dipped below 50 percent since the report launched. Thirty-nine percent of manufacturers said they believed the economy is either slowing down or heading toward a recession, down from 50 percent in 2022, the report said.

When executives talked about the economy in the focus groups, their concerns centered around “uncertainty,” said Buckley Brinkman, executive director of the Wisconsin Center for Manufacturing and Productivity.

“We had been predicting a recession for three years and it never came,” he said. “Now, people were a little bit more cautious about where the economy was going, although, overall they were still fairly optimistic about their ability to weather the storm.”

An overwhelming majority of Wisconsin manufacturers, 85 percent, said they were “confident” about their own company’s financial future, the report said. That number was unchanged from 2023.

While manufacturers remain confident about their businesses, the report says there are “at risk” manufacturers in Wisconsin that “may not survive future economic shocks.”

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