31-07-2025
In A Tough Business Cycle, 3D Printers Leverage Established Markets
Additive manufacturing hasn't been spared the challenging economic and policy environment that industry as a whole has been grappling with recently, but AM faces the additional difficulty that it's still finding its best fit in how things are made. With those challenges, the big players are looking forward at how best to leverage the technology's strengths. The good news is that there are some now well-established areas of success that are helping guide the way.
'3D printing today, whether it's a vat-based resin technology, a powder technology, a ceramic metal powder technology, all face the same challenges,' Andy Middleton, UltiMaker's new SVP EMEA & global marketing, told me in an interview. 'Repeatability across multiple output devices, mechanical properties of the final part, and ease of use… So our job at Ultimaker, and that's why I joined Ultimaker quite recently, is to define where 3D printing—additive manufacturing—makes sense.'
That represents much of the industry's work over the past decade or so, as the technology broke out from its prototyping role into production of end-use parts. Probably no market showcases the strength of AM better than defense and aerospace.
'Defense will be, in my opinion, and in our company's opinion, one of the major adopters of FDM, our technology,' said Middleton. 'In 2025, 2026 it's going to be taking upwards of 25 to 30% of our business, because now the materials we can print can replace metal parts with carbon fiber, nylon-reinforced and so on.'
3D Systems is also betting big on that same market. 'For me, in aerospace and defense, we do quite a bit with casting technology using the stereolithography,' Mike Shepard, the company's VP, aerospace & defense segment,' said in an interview. 'Our trade name for it is QuickCast… We create these polymer investment casting patterns. Traditionally, in investment casting, one of the problems is to get the shape right. I don't want to say you get the shape for free, but getting the shape has become dramatically easier. And so we keep investing in the SLA technology…. We've got a new machine out there… a two-laser SLA system. It's super-productive. And you can make casting patterns that are pretty big right out of the machine. But then you can also glue them together, and you can create truly enormous casting patterns… We've been very active with naval recently, and the naval space really uses a lot of sand castings.'
Space applications are another focus area for 3D Systems. 'We've been very active in space historically,' said Shepard. 'Not just on the rocket side, but especially on the satellite side. There's a lot of satellites or payloads, and there's a lot of good reason to get weight out of those. There are a few superpowers that additive has, and one of them is getting weight out because you can make these highly optimized structures. A lot of the space structures we work in—brackets, things like that—10, 20, 25% of the weight you can get out of those structures.'
Another area of opportunity for the defense industry that Ultimaker has focused on has been on-demand spare parts. 'I attended a NATO conference just six, seven weeks ago,' Middleton explained. 'They have a very nice phraseology in peacetime and in non-peacetime—they need to be able to deploy such printers that can do a myriad of applications... Much of the hardware being used in the field is 30, 40 years old, and spare parts don't exist. So they are re-engineering those spare parts.'
That same focus area has also led to business in non-defense applications. 'Also as an example is the food and beverage industry, where Coca Cola Bottling plants or Heineken bottling plants have these hugely capital-intensive lines. If one little widget breaks, which is guiding bottles to be filled, that machine goes down.'
The trouble arises when the replacement for the little widget that broke isn't in the spare parts room, and the company that made the machine can't get a part out immediately. That can mean millions of dollars in lost production. With 3D printing, rather than sending the part, the OEM simply sends a file to be printed on-site. 'The beauty is this bottling line, we have nothing to do with it,' Middleton continued. 'That's manufactured by a German company. They're all over the US, a company called PHS, so they are now saying, hey, they can't ship the spare part in time. It's three days, best case. So now they're building a business model to send the file.'
One routine part of today's 3D printing business story is consolidation, and that's been part of the game plan for both 3D Systems and Ultimaker. (There are much less friendly twists on this theme, as with Nano Dimension's recent move to acquire Desktop Metal, then break it up and sell the parts.)
For 3D Systems, much of the work Shepard described with sand molds was enabled by the company's 2022 acquisition of Titan Robotics, a Colorado-based designer and fabricator of large-format industrial 3D printers. 'The Titan machines themselves can have a very large build volume, but they can work directly with injection molding pellets,' Shepard said. 'So there's a huge range of materials that you can engage with. And then on top of that, you can lay down a lot of material really fast.'
On the Ultimaker side, its 2022 merger with MakerBot was one of the biggest consolidation stories yet in the AM business world.
Looking forward, both companies are focused on enabling customers to make the most use of their revolutionary manufacturing methodologies.
'I think we're the biggest experts on deployment and training and enablement,' said Middleton. 'The barrier has been the ability of companies to transfer knowledge. How do I integrate it into my workflow? We've got workflows which integrate into ERP systems. The ease of our technology to operate is incomparable to other technologies.'
Shepard added, 'I think we need to be better at proselytizing for additive manufacturing and better at helping great manufacturing companies that have not really adopted additive manufacturing, helping them adopt the technology and helping them find exactly the way that it is going to slide in most comfortably with their businesses, and helping them be successful as quickly as possible.'
