INDUSTRY REPORT
STATE OF THE INDUSTRY
WORDS: DANIEL O'CONNOR
“THE REALITY IS AM IS STILL A VERY SMALL INDUSTRY; WE USE THE NUMBERS WITHOUT PUTTING THEM INTO ANY SORT OF CONTEXT.� DR PHIL REEVES
A
nalysing the health of the additive manufacturing (AM) industry is a tricky task; ask the OEMs and they'll no doubt tell you all is well, even if there has been some serious restructuring. Ask a user, and they'll likely only see it from their positive perspective of a broader range of materials and machinery. Ask some industry analysts, they'll give you doom and gloom or a booming bonanza, dependent on their leanings. The truth of the matter is that the state of the industry is almost impossible to judge. And what else do you expect from an industry in which the machines vary in price from hundreds to millions of dollars? "It's always weird to talk about the 3D printing market because there's hardly one market," says Chris Connery VP Global Research & Analysis at Context. "That's why we break it down at this super high level of personal, professional, design and industrial machinery shipments. Take for example the industrial category [machinery over 100,000 USD typically metal]; overall, we talked about the metal 3D printing industry having a good quarter (Q3 2019), but only because of this new material extrusion metal technology like Desktop Metal and Markforged. When you break it down, you had a bit of a difficult Q3 for the powder bed fusion players. GE and EOS, for example, both saw a decline year over year in Q3." Those figures are odd given that powder bed fusion technologies are maturing to the point BMW is using the technology for automotive series production and the metal4
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