In October, the latest CONTEXT report suggested decline in industrial 3D printer revenues raised concerns.
Despite the number of additive manufacturing success stories growing, despite industry leaders proving the technology capable of enabling industry-standard end-use parts, sales figures of AM's more industrial hardware haven't always kept pace. In October, CONTEXT reported that there was a 17% decline in Industrial printer revenues for Q2 of 2024 compared to the same period last year.
At Formnext, we caught up with Andy Langfeld - President EMEA of Stratasys - to get his thoughts on the progress being made in the AM sector against market-wide objectives of becoming a bona fide manufacturing tool.
TCT: With most of the industry working towards making 3D printing production ready and chasing higher volume applications, how would you assess the maturity of the technologies against that goal?
AL: The level of maturity is obviously different from use case to use case. There's very high level of maturity in all prototyping. When you look at all of the prototypes being produced on an annual basis, 40% of them are additive. So, it's mature, it's accepted, it's almost the standard solution that you would choose for prototyping. In tooling, jigs and fixtures, the transition to manufacturing, it's already looking a bit different. It's 0.5% of all of the tools, jigs and fixtures that are being produced are made additively. So just imagine the amount of potential that we still have to unfold. Unfortunately, in a slow scaling industry, it is customer by customer, use case by use case, part by part.
I would say there is a high level of maturity when it comes to high requirement low volume parts. So, looking into Siemens Mobility and the production of spare parts for trains and trams, looking into aerospace production of in-flight parts in the cabin area. That's where there is a high level of maturity. But yet improvements to be done, and one improvement could be the cost per part. So, when you have 1,000 potential parts that you want to produce, but the barrier of adoption is the price per part.
Either we need to develop new materials that are lower in the production cost, we need to leverage maybe other technologies, not FDM, for example, but maybe SAF, or get the industry required certifications like flame retardant, toxicity and so forth, and then offer an improved solution to the customers. So, I think that's where the maturity still needs to catch up, especially if you go into larger volumes.
TCT: So, that’s the technology. How about the maturity of the industry’s business models, messaging, and go-to-market strategies?
AL: I think the level of confidence is growing a lot because we are collecting more and more success stories. We are always learning a lot from our customers. They sometimes take it into new use cases that we didn't have on our agenda, but I think there is a proof point of higher confidence, because it works. And if you have a customer who is using 3D printing for mission critical, not for nice to have, I think that's where we, first of all, as one of the leaders of the industry, stand up to deliver on that promise. Because I think many times, customers have been disappointed, and there is a reason to be for a 1000-Euro printer with cheap material. But if that creates the expectation setting of the user that this is additive, that's a problem, because there is a difference between an F3300 and a small desktop FFF printer.
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TCT: If we accept this industry is maturing, what do you point to as the most significant developments that have led to that progress being made?
AL: I think one thing is predictability, and the other one is reliability or repeatability. And if you check the boxes on those three, I think that's the standard we need to deliver if we want to be considered as a production solution. And there are small examples, if you look at the F3300 versus other FFF machines, if you want to see how your machine is performing during the print, and you want to give the customer, the user, a good feeling about what's happening, is the print going to be okay? Am I still printing as a machine? So, what is the data that we make visible for the customer during the print? That's one big step, where the F3300 has sensors to see if the extrusion is in line with what it should be. We have machines now with cameras where you can check the layers. So I think there is a lot of help for the customer to have this level of confidence that there is a reliable solution.
The repeatability, if you want to have a digitized warehouse, you need to have exactly the same outcome, no matter if you print in Brazil or in Germany. So, our hardware and the materials that we deliver to our customers need to be a top standard, and it shouldn't be that this machine is performing a little bit differently from that machine because the outside temperature is 10 degrees higher. That's securing this repeatability and predictability. Also in connection to sustainability, we enable customers to understand the CO2 footprint of what you are going to print. So, if you want to compare a part that you produce with a traditional process, we will gather the data and before printing via GrabCAD show to the user or the customer what the CO2 footprint is going to be. I think it's getting more complex and the fact that we are dealing with data that is giving you insight about sustainability and other stuff is, by itself, a sign of higher maturity.
TCT: You mentioned digitised warehouses there. That’s an opportunity that this industry talks a lot about. From your experience, are they becoming a reality?
AL: It is becoming a reality, and, indeed, it's customer by customer, step by step. But you see more and more companies who are taking the challenge to get there, and the challenges are manyfold. One challenge is to digitise your BOM, which is a huge problem for a lot of companies, digitizing the ERP system and the spare part catalogue that we have, for example. And then to drive your internal customer acceptance, that's quite interesting. When you need an urgent spare part, you need to have your internal customer to have the trust that it's going to work. Because otherwise they would say, ‘For me, this is mission critical. We need produce it in the best possible way.’ And if there a trust that additive can deliver and additive is actually, probably, the solution which can deliver the fastest, on-demand, I think this is where you see a growing adoption on the digitisation and on-demand production of spare parts across various industries.
TCT: We come back to repeatability and reliability. It’s all well and good saying we can get this part to you tomorrow, but if it doesn’t work then it’s futile.
AL: And that's where you also need to understand the customer requirements and in a production environment and something that is mission critical, the expectation of uptime is 99%. It's not going to be 60. So, just talking about such numbers in additive was unheard of 10 years ago. [Maybe it used to be] ‘If you want to have uptime of 99% then just buy 10 machines. One of them will work.’ Now it's different. It's the single machine which needs to deliver that promise, to bring that level of quality and reliability.
TCT: What are the customer challenges Stratasys is looking to overcome moving forward?
AL: One is a bit of a more open approach towards industry, networking and corporations and collaborations, because one of the big barriers for adoption is still design for additive. It's purely on the design side. In aerospace, we're partnering with AM Craft and they bring the capability to certify design for aerospace. And that's part of the solution. An MRO or an airline will never go with a design if it's not certified. It basically means that there is a guarantee that it's exactly this design, no matter where you produce it, the workflow, the process, everything has been logged, and then you need to have the certified production, so partnering with someone who has the missing capability from our perspective. That's one way how to accelerate adoption.
Another one is within our own portfolio. And that basically goes down to continuous investment into R&D, which [for Stratasys] is in a ballpark of 90 to 100 million on an annual basis, bringing more and more materials, investing into the capability to certify the materials for industry standards like aerospace, automotive and so forth, but also to have the right technology for the use case. Not squeezing whatever we have into everything, but really working with the customer to provide a solution and to look at what is the problem you have, what is the solution, which would make you happy? And that's a holistic approach. It requires software, it requires the hardware, the materials, the automation, the post processing, and then again, when we are not the expert of one of those needed elements, it's embracing a collaboration approach and to work with the partners in the industry who can deliver.
TCT: So, do you see the idea of specific printers for specific applications becoming more common?
AL: I think it's mixing the capability of the technology, which is the hardware, with the right materials. I think you can still have a platform which is serving [many] different industries. It's like in the car industry, you have a platform and you can make a van out of it, or a truck, so I think leveraging the platform, but the right ingredients will address a specific use case. And the ingredients could be a specific material that needs to be performing 100% accurately on that platform, a software tool which is enabling me to optimise the design for that use case. So, I think it's not about having a printer for just a vertical. It's addressing the most promising use cases, leveraging the core technology and the core knowledge and know-how that we have, and then adding the ingredients that the specific customer audience needs.
TCT: Finally, if you look at CONTEXT reports and their measurement of AM machine shipments quarterly, there isn’t yet a consistent trajectory for industrial 3D printer sales. How do you think AM companies can begin to ensure consistent growth in machine sales?
AL: The trend is pretty much in line with the macro situation. So, in times like this, the investments into capex above 100,000 euros, whatever it is, are suffering. So, 3D printing is one of them. But I think the secret to this different level of consistency is scale, and our approach to scale is the use case strategic approach, where we analyse a lot of use cases. This is where we need to prove, with a few thought leader customers, that it works. And then you need to have this global network and the marketing presence and the branding that you scale into many, many different companies with that use case. And this is where, to be honest, additive is pretty small today.
So, if you look at the CONTEXT reports, and you think the amount of machines above 20k as an example, it's a small industry, but the opportunity is that one of those use cases can be as big as 3D printing is today. So, you talk about an 18 billion industry, including services, materials, hardware, hardware through services – which is actually double counting – but that's an 18 billion industry. If you look at the manufacturing industry, which is the same in trillion and 0.05% of what is being produced today is additive, if you take that from 0.05 to 01, or to, I don't know, 1%, that's where we will talk about a different level of consistency. But it's taking time. It's use case by use case, customer by customer. We spoke about quality, we spoke about the repeatability, reliability, and it's a journey.
