Read time: 16 mins.
Key highlights:
- Defining the dynamics: The ins and outs of application development collaborations.
- Picking up the tab: How stakeholders determine who foots the bill on costly engineering projects.
- Perfecting the practice: Insights on application development best practices.
This article was first published via the Additive Insight newsletter on May 15th, 2025.
If you were to look objectively at the additive manufacturing market – a market where most technology providers (at least the publicly listed ones) are not profitable – you would probably arrive at the conclusion that there is more supply than there is demand.
Industry analysts have previously referred to additive manufacturing technology as a hammer looking for a nail, particularly when assessing its prospective use as a manufacturing tool. Early 3D printing inventors were looking to address the time and cost of design iteration and validation, removing tooling from the prototyping process and eliminating the lead times brought on by outsourcing to external suppliers.
Rapid prototyping was (is) a killer application of the technology. The industry could have stopped there, accepting that the first movers – the likes of Stratasys, 3D Systems and EOS – would forever more dominate a fruitful, but effectively stagnant, marketplace. But it didn’t. The prospect of disrupting the manufacture of end-use parts proved too attractive. And so, the OEMs, backed by investment dollars and encouraged by manufacturers, embarked on a decades-long pursuit of a fraction of the multi-trillion-dollar manufacturing sector. To varying degrees of success.
It's a pursuit that has seen many companies appear and disappear, rise and fall, go back to the venture capital (VC) well time and time again. And it’s one that has seen most, if not all, additive manufacturing technology providers spend thousands of engineering hours to develop an application – or applications – that would make it all worthwhile.
It may be an oversimplification, but the ones who have gone out of business and will go out of business are the ones who haven’t unlocked enough applications. A real case of get rich or die trying.
As detailed in a previous TCT Deep Dives newsletter, Forward AM has been on the brink in recent months, filing for insolvency at the end of last year. It’s in this position for a variety of factors, but Forward AM CEO Martin Back believes among them is be the cost – and slow return on investment – of application development.
“The synchronisation,” Back told TCT of materials, machines and applications, “is so much effort and somebody needs to do it, and somebody needs to be paid for it. Somehow, additive manufacturing spoiled their customers so much – maybe based on cheap VC money in the past and excessive expectation and so on, that it became a habit that we do it for free.”
So, in a market that isn’t exactly swimming in profit, are additive manufacturing tech providers doing too much for too little?
